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continued on back cover
FRANZ KAFKA
A BIOGRAPHY
 .

'
 Franz
KAFKA
A Biography hy Max Brod

SCHOCKEN BOOKS • NEW YORK

 With a few minor omissions,
this paperback edition is identical
with the second enlarged cloth
edition published in 1960.

First Schocken Paperback edition, 1963

Third Printing, 1968

Translated from the German

by G. Humphreys Roberts (chapter 1 to VII)
and by Richard Winston (chapter VIII)
Copyright 1937 by Heinr. Mercy Sohn, Prague
Copyright 1947 by Schocken Books Inc.
Copyright © 1960 by Schocken Books Inc.
Library of Congress Catalogue Card Number: 60-14601
Manufactured in the United States of America
 CONTENTS

PAGE

CHAPTER I:
Parents and Childhood. 3

chapter n:
The University. 39

chapter m:
To Earn One’s Living or Live One’s Life? ... 78

chapter iv:
Up to the Publication of “Contemplation” . . . 100

chapter v:
The Engagement.139

chapter vi:
Religious Development.168

chapter vh:
The Last Years.196

chapter vm:
New Aspects of Kafka . ..214

Chronological Table.244

index.266
 NOTES TO THE SECOND EDITION

P. 8 et passim: “Contemplation” was published under the

title “Meditation” in The Penal Colony, Stories and Short
Pieces, New York 1948.
P. 8 et passim: The diary was published under the title
The Diaries of Franz Kafka, edited by Max Brod, two vol¬
umes, New York 1948-1949.
P. 8, line 22: “The Merchant” was published under the title
“The Tradesman,” in The Penal Colony, pp. 31 ff.
P. 15 et passim: “Letter to My Father” appeared under the
title “Letter to His Father,” in Dearest Father, Stories and
Other Writings, New York 1954. (The reasons for withhold¬
ing the publication of the “Letter” are no longer valid.)
P. 60, line 6 from the bottom: “Preparations for a Wedding in
the Country” was published under the title “Wedding Prep¬
arations in the Country” in Dearest Father.
P. 61, note 1, line 2: “Description of a Battle” was issued
under the title “Description of a Struggle” in the volume
Description of a Struggle, New York 1958.
P. 62, lines 21-22: “At the Window,” “At Night” were pub¬
lished under the titles “Absent-minded Window-gazing,”
“Passers-by,” “Clothes,” “The Passenger,” “Thoughts for
Gentlemen Riders” appeared under the titles “Clothes,” “On
the Tram,” “Reflections for Gentlemen-Jockeys” in The Penal
Colony. (Lines 24-28 to be changed accordingly.)
P. 105, lines 19-20: “The Aeroplanes at Brescia” was pub¬
lished in the Appendix to The Penal Colony.
P. 132, line 3: “Children on the Post Road” appeared under
the title “Children on a Country Road” in The Penal Colony.

P. 164, lines 15-17: A volume of letters by Kafka appeared

under the title Briefe 1902-1924, New York 1958.

P. 178, line 19: The letter to Oskar Poliak (Fall 1902) ap¬
peared in Briefe 1902-1924, p. 14.
 CHAPTER I

PARENTS AND CHILDHOOD

FRANZ KAFKA, son of Hermann and Julie Kafka, was born

in Prague, July 3, 1883. The name Kafka is Czech by origin
and—in its correct spelling of “Kavka”—literally means “Jack¬
daw.” This bird, with its big head and beautiful tail, was em¬
bossed on the business envelopes of the firm of Hermann
Kafka in which Franz in the old days often used to enclose
his letters to me.
Kafka is not an uncommon surname among Jews whose
families came from Czech districts, that is to say, Jews whose
families lived in Czech districts at the time that the Emperor
Joseph II ordered a census of all Jews. It provides no clue to
the bearer’s political or national sympathies. Franz’s father,
it is true, seems to have had a certain sympathy—though one
could hardly call it a marked one—with the fighting Czech
parties of Old Austria, and memories of his Czech home town
may well have contributed to it. But Franz went only to Ger¬
man schools, was brought up as a German, and only later,
led by his own inclinations, acquired a thorough knowledge
of Czech and a deep understanding of its literature—with¬
out, of course, neglecting his close connection with Ger¬
man culture. The importance of his Jewish background, of
which he later became conscious, will be discussed in due
course. A second cousin of Franz’s very like him in appear¬
ance, in fact a sort of sturdier, stronger edition of Franz,
whom Franz much admired for his systematic energy and
organizing ability, was a leading figure in German liberal
circles when he was still a student, as well as later as a uni¬
versity don and member of the Czech parliament. This was
Professor Bruno Kafka, who, although he died young, could
point to ample evidence of a fruitful life as a critic and cre¬
ative collaborator in drawing up bills of parliament, as a poli¬
tician, as the editor of the posthumous scientific writings of
3
Krasnopolski, and by his own work in jurisprudence. Franz’s
and Bruno’s fathers were first cousins.
This is what Kafka writes about his parentage in his diary:
“In Hebrew my name is Amschel, the same as my grand¬
father’s on my mother’s side, whom my mother, who was six
years old when he died, can just remember as a very pious
and learned man, with a long white beard. She remembers
she had to take hold of the corpse by the toes and beg her
grandfather’s forgiveness for any wrong she might possibly
have done him. She remembers, too, what a quantity of books
her grandfather had, and how they filled all the wall space.
He used to bathe in the river every day, even in winter, when
he would cut a hole in the ice to bathe in. My mother’s
mother died at an early age of typhoid fever. After her death
her grandmother succumbed to low spirits, refused to eat,
and would not speak to anyone. One day, a year after her
daughter’s death, she went for a walk and never came back.
They dragged her body out of the Elbe. My mother’s great¬
grandfather was an even greater scholar than her grand¬
father, and enjoyed an equal respect among Christians and
Jews. His piety was such that a miracle took place during a
big fire, when the fire passed over his house, and spared it,
though all the other houses round about were burnt down.
He had four sons; one turned Christian and became a doctor.
All of them except my mother’s grandfather died young. He
had a son whom my mother knew as mad Uncle Nathan, and
a daughter who was, of course, my mother’s mother.”
From Franz’s mother, whom I often used to talk to until
her death in 1934—she outlived her son by ten years—and
who was a quiet, pleasant, extremely clever, not to say wise,
woman, I was able to get details to complete the picture. Ac¬
cording to her, the Kafkas on the father’s side came from
Wossek near Strakonic (South Bohemia). Hermann Kafka’s
father was a butcher. Hermann’s youth was hard and full of
hard work; obviously his capacity for work and endurance
was boundless. The rest of the family, too—three brothers
and two sisters—were, in the words of Mrs. Julie Kafka,
Franz’s mother, “giants.” All his life Franz was over-
4
shadowed by the figure of his powerful and extraordinarily
imposing father—tall, broad-shouldered—who, at the end of
a life full of work and success in business, but also full of
worries and illness, succeeded in leaving a large family, chil¬
dren and nephews, in whom he took a patriarchal pride and
(after selling a wholesale business in the Old Town Square,
which still1 exists) a block of flats in the center of Prague.
The way this firm was founded by a widely ramified family
and kept with great sacrifice and effort in good middle-class
style by nothing but its founder’s own hard, thorough, care¬
ful work, always remained a shining example for Franz’s
imagination and creative genius. His admiration for his
father in this respect was endless—it had a touch of the heroic
in it; in fact, an impartial onlooker who was not under the
spell of the family circle could not but feel that it contained,
alongside right and proper elements, something of exaggera¬
tion too. Anyhow, it was fundamental in Franz’s emotional
development. How much so can be seen from the following-
critical—entries in the diary which I quote because they give
a good picture of how his father began life.
Franz writes:
“It’s unpleasant to listen to father talking about what he
had to go through as a child, with his constant digs at how
lucky people are nowadays, especially his own children. No¬
body denies that for years he had sores on his legs because
his winter clothes were too light; that he was often hungry;
that when he was only ten he had to push a handcart round
the villages, in winter too, and very early in the morning—
but, a thing he will never understand, from these undeniable
facts, together with the equally undeniable fact that I have
not been through all this, it doesn’t in the least follow that I
have been luckier than he; that he can preen himself on these
sores on his legs; that he should take it absolutely for granted,
and insist on it; that I can’t appreciate what he went through
then; and that finally I must be unboundedly grateful to him
just because I never went through the same. How I should
1 [This and succeeding references to a present time are references to
the year 1937, when this biography was written.]
5
like to hear him talking on forever about his childhood and
his parents, but to hear all this in a boastful and quarrelsome
tone is distressing. He is forever beating his hands together:
‘Who nowadays knows anything about it! What do the chil¬
dren know about it! Nobody else has been through it! Is
there one of you children knows anything about it?’ Today
Aunt Julie was here, and there was the same kind of talk. She
has that enormous face that all our relations on father’s side
have. There’s just a tiny upsetting something about either
the set or the color of her eyes. When she was ten she had to
go into service as a kitchen-maid. When it was freezing cold
she had to run about in a wet skirt; the skin on her legs used
to chap; the skirt used to freeze, and didn’t get dry until she
got to bed in the evening.”
I am now going back to what Franz’s mother told me. His
grandmother on his father’s side, a Platovsky, was described
as very kindhearted; she had a great reputation among the
people of the village for her medical knowledge. In general,
on the father’s side the predominant hereditary character¬
istics would seem to be a fighting capacity for living and
getting the better of life, even physical strength, too. Her¬
mann did three years’ military service, and liked to talk about
his soldiering even when he was an old man—used to sing
soldiers’ songs when he was in a good mood—which was not
very often, admittedly. His father, Franz’s grandfather that
is, could lift a sack of flour from the ground with his teeth.
Once when some gipsies went into a lonely little inn, the
terrified landlord sent for Kafka’s grandfather. It was not
long before he had beaten the unwelcome guests out of the
place.
When we turn to the mother’s family we are presented
with quite a different picture. Here we find scholars,
dreamers, inclined to eccentricity, and others driven by this
inclination to the adventurous, the exotic, or the freakish and
reclusive.
The passage from Franz’s diary quoted above hints at the
piety and scholarly reputation—in rabbinical lore—of his
mother’s grandfather and great-grandfather. Bathing in the
6
icy river is to be regarded, too, as a rite practiced by an ex¬
ceptionally pious man, and not as part of a “back-to-nature”
health cult which did not exist at that time, or at any rate
was unknown among the Jews. These two men belonged
to the Porias family and lived at Podebrady. The great¬
grandfather always wore the fringes that his religion or¬
dained over his clothes, not under them. Children used to
run after him and mock him, but were later spoken to in the—
Christian—school, and told they mustn’t make fun of such
a pious man. The grandfather’s only child, who died so young
and thus probably caused her mother’s suicide, was Esther
Porias, and she married a Jakob Lowy. There were six chil¬
dren, the second eldest (Julie Lowy) became Franz Kafka’s
mother. The eldest brother (Alfred) went abroad as a young
man, and rose, covered with decorations, to be general man¬
ager of the Spanish railways. He stayed a bachelor, often
came to Prague, and had a certain influence on Franz’s boy¬
hood, chiefly because Franz hoped he would give him his start
in practical life. Franz longed for far-off lands, to which in
fact another of his mother’s brothers had been led by his ca¬
reer—Joseph—who was in charge of a trading-station in the
Congo, and had fitted out caravans sometimes as many as a
hundred and fifty strong. He lived later in Paris, married to a
Frenchwoman. What was life in their case became literature
in Kafka’s work, became all the exotic countries which formed
the scenes of Kafka’s completed works and drafts. Uncle
Alfred in Madrid was reputed to be reserved, but kindly, and
to have a strong feeling for the family. (I met him but retain
no clear-cut impression.) How disappointed Kafka was in
him can be seen in a letter to a friend of his boyhood, Oskar
Poliak. Franz had asked him “if he couldn’t somehow help me
to get out of all this, and if he couldn’t take me somewhere
where I could at last set my hand to something fresh.” Franz
had always looked on his legal profession solely as a make¬
shift, and dreamed of other activities. His relations with his
uncle, to whom, we may be sure, he had only shyly hinted
his youthful desires, nevertheless remained not unfriendly,
within the general family coolness.
7
 Another of his mother’s brothers (Rudolf) lived a lonely
crank in a little bookkeeper’s office in the Kosir brewery, and
went over to Catholicism out of conviction. The youngest
brother (Siegfried) was a country doctor in Triesch, also a
bachelor, came later to Prague and settled in the house that
belonged to the Kafka family, and played an active part in
Franz’s fate in the last stage of his life through his medical
treatment of him.
Franz was born, according to his mother, in the house on
the corner of Maislgasse and Karpfengasse (now Kaprovd).
Other childhood scenes were the Lamel Institute in the
Geistgasse (Dusni), the house called “Minuta,” and the
house on the corner of Wenzelsplatz and Smecky. When I
first went to see him, the Kafkas lived in the narrow, twisty,
ancient, but friendly building next to the Them church, in
the Zeltnergasse (No. 3 Celetna). His father’s warehouse was
also in the Zeltnergasse before it was transferred to prem¬
ises in the Kinsky Palace in the Old Town Square. In Kafka’s
“Contemplation” and other works of his early period, and
of course in the diary, you can see the manifold impressions
left by the sights and situation of this warehouse. You have
only to read the sketch “The Merchant.” Who are these “un¬
approachable people from the country” whose fashions the
“merchant” must cater to—“different from those that reign
among the people in my circle”? Hermann Kafka’s wholesale
warehouse stocked haberdashery for sale to retailers in vil¬
lages and country towns. I remember with particular dis¬
tinctness the quantities of warm slippers I saw in the ware¬
house when Franz, accompanied by me, made yet another
vain attempt somehow to help his father, groaning under the
amount of work he had, or at least to show his good will, to
win without making a great fuss a friendly glance or a word
of recognition from him. His mother herself was untiringly
busy helping his father in the business, and most probably
irreplaceable. I even saw one of Franz’s sisters there for some
time. But that was not nearly enough for his father, whose
domineering character would best have liked to have his
family round him all the time. How far back, and how dimly
8
these recollections stretch! But two other homes where I
often went to see Franz are quite clear in my memory—Nik-
lasstrasse 36 (now Pariska), overlooking the quay, the Mol-
dava, the baths, the bridges, and the green slope of the
Belvedere; and the Oppelt house on the comer of Niklas-
strasse and the Old Town Square. Kafka’s study was on the
Niklas street side, with its window right on the left of the top
floor. You looked down on a more-than-lifesize baroque fig¬
ure on the Russian church.
Franz was the eldest. Two brothers (Heinrich and
George) died in infancy (one was two, the other a year and
a half old). Six years later came the series of three sisters,
who always held together and were conscious of the gap be¬
tween them and their brother. Later, after Franz’s illness, the
youngest sister closed up this distance with the greatest firm¬
ness. She was and remained for Franz one of the most
trusted and intimate of human beings—but Franz’s childhood,
by all accounts, must have been indescribably lonely. As his
mother was busy all day in the warehouse, and his father
couldn’t do without her company—particularly for a game of
cards—in the evenings either, Franz’s education was en¬
trusted chiefly to governesses and soulless schools. His first
memories of erotic awakening are connected with a French
governess or some Frenchwoman.
The sadness and awkwardness of his early years—“earth-
weight” Kafka calls this characteristic in another connec¬
tion—are described in pages in the diary like the following
from 1911, a long way back, that is to say:
“While I sometimes believe that all through my secondary
schooldays and even earlier I could think unusually clearly,
and that it is only because my memory later became weaker
that this cannot be appraised correctly, at other times I ad¬
mit that my bad memory only wants to flatter me and that
I was mentally extremely lazy in things which are unim¬
portant in themselves but fraught with consequences. Thus
I can remember, anyhow, that when I was at my secondary
school I often debated, even if not very thoroughly—I got
tired easily even then, probably—with Bergmann in some
9
fashion either following my own inward reasoning or follow¬
ing the Talmud, in a way I copied from him, about God and
the possibility of His existence. At that time I used to like
tacking the debate on to an article I had found in some
Christian paper—I think Die christliche Welt—in which a
clock and the world were compared to a watchmaker and
God, and the existence of the watchmaker was supposed to
prove that of God. I thought I could refute this very well as
far as Bergmann was concerned, although the refutation was
not firmly founded in me myself, and I had first, before I
could produce it, to fit it together like a jigsaw puzzle. But
the refutation did once take place as we were walking round
the Town Hall clock. I remember it so exactly because we
reminded one another of it a few years ago. But while I be¬
lieved I excelled in that—it was only through the urge to
excel, and the pleasure in producing an effect, and in the
effect itself, that I could bring myself to do it—it was through
not thinking deeply enough that I always walked about in
bad clothes which my parents had made for me first by one
customer, then by another, but longest of all by a tailor in
Nusle. I noticed, of course, as it was only too easy to do, that
I was particularly badly dressed, and even had an eye for
others who were well dressed, but my brain didn’t discover
for years that my clothes were responsible for my miserable
appearance. As I was already on the way, more in appre¬
hension than in reality, to underestimate myself, I was con¬
vinced that it was only on me that clothes looked either as
stiff as boards or hung in creases. I didn’t want any new
clothes at all; because if I had to look ugly anyway, I wanted
at least to be comfortable, and further, since people were
accustomed to my old clothes, to avoid demonstrating to the
world the ugliness of new ones. These constant refusals when
my mother wanted to have these new clothes made for me,
for she, with the eye of a grown-up, could after all see the
difference between the old and the new clothes, also had
their effect on me, as, with my parents confirming it, I
couldn’t help telling myself I didn’t care about my appear¬
ance. In consequence, I let my badly cut clothes govern my
10
 carriage, walked about with my back bent, my shoulders
crooked, and my arms and hands all over the place; I was
afraid of mirrors because, according to one of my ways of
looking at it, they showed an inescapable ugliness, which
moreover could not be absolutely faithfully mirrored, be¬
cause if I had really looked like that I must have excited
even greater attention. I put up with gentle pokes in the back
from my mother on our Sunday walks, and with warnings
and prophecies which were much too remote for me to be
able to connect them with the sufferings I was then enduring.
In general, my worst defect was an incapacity for taking the
least thought for the actual future. I stayed with my thoughts
firmly on the present circumstances, not out of thoroughness
or from any too firmly held interest in them, but from sad¬
ness and fear—from sadness because, since the present was
so sad I believed I dare not leave it until it turned into happi¬
ness; from fear, because, afraid as I was of the smallest pres¬
ent step, I considered myself unworthy, with my contempti¬
ble childish behavior, seriously and responsibly to form an
opinion about the great adult future, which, in any case, gen¬
erally appeared to me so impossible that every tiny advance
seemed a fraud, and the next impossible of achievement.
Miracles I could admit more easily than any real progress,
but was too unconcerned not to leave miracles in their sphere
and real progress in its. As a result I could spend a long time
before going to sleep, imagining myself one day driving into
the ghetto as a rich man in a coach-and-four, and with one
word rescuing a beautiful girl who was being unjustly
beaten, and taking her away with me in my carriage; but un¬
disturbed by all this make-believe which probably fed on
nothing more than a sexuality which was already unhealthy,
the conviction remained that I should not get through the
end-of-year exam, and even if I did I should make no head¬
way in the next class; and even if by some swindle that could
be avoided, I was bound to fail matriculation completely,
and anyhow, it was quite certain, no matter at what par¬
ticular moment it might happen, my parents, so far lulled by
my, to all appearances, regular progress, and the rest of the
11
world with them, would suddenly be surprised by the revela¬
tion of some unheard-of incapacity. But seeing that the only
fingerpost to the future I ever looked at was my incapacity-
only very seldom my feeble literary work—thinking over the
future brought me no profit; it was merely a drawing-out of
my present sadness. If I wanted to, I could hold myself
straight enough, but it made me tired, and I couldn’t see
what difference round shoulders could make to my future. If
I am to have a future, my feeling was, everything will come
right of itself. Such a principle I didn’t choose because it gave
me any confidence in the future, in the existence of which I
didn’t believe anyway, but rather for the purpose of making
life easier. My principle was to walk, to dress, to wash, to
read, above all to shut myself up in my room in the way that
caused me the least trouble, and that demanded the least
courage. If I departed from this principle, I only landed in
some ridiculous evasion. There was a time when it seemed
it was impossible for me to manage any longer without some
kind of evening clothes, particularly as I had to make up my
mind whether I should join a dancing class or not. The tailor
from Nusle was summoned and the style of the suit was dis¬
cussed. As always in such cases I couldn’t make up my mind,
because I was always afraid that if I made a definite state¬
ment I might be rushed not only into some unpleasant next
step but even further along into something still more fright¬
ful. So first of all I decided I wouldn’t have a black suit; but
when I was put to shame in front of the stranger by its being
pointed out to me that I had no evening wear at all, I al¬
lowed the question of an evening dress suit to be brought up;
but as I felt that evening dress was a revolution of my habits
that one could just bear to hear mentioned, but could never
allow to be realized, we decided on a dinner jacket, which I
thought I might at least be able to wear, because it was so
like an ordinary jacket. But when I heard that the jacket had
to be low-cut, which meant I should have to wear a boiled
shirt, I almost overstrained myself to decide against it, know¬
ing that this kind of thing could be warded off. I didn’t want
that kind of dinner jacket; I was prepared to have one lined
12
 with silk and with silk facings, if that had to be, but the jacket
must button high. Such a dinner jacket the tailor had never
heard of, but he remarked that whatever kind of suit I was
thinking of, it certainly couldn’t be for going to dances in.
Very well, then it wasn’t for going to dances I wanted it, I
didn t want to dance at all in fact; that was a question which
was far from being settled, but I did want to have a suit made
like the one I described. What made the tailor even less ca¬
pable of grasping my meaning was that hitherto I had had
myself measured and fitted for new clothes in a kind of
ashamed haste, without expressing any comments or desires.
So the only thing left for me to do, particularly as my mother
was insistent, was, embarrassing as it might be, to go with
him across the Old Town Square to a shop window where I
had seen a harmless dinner jacket of this kirid displayed for
quite a long time, and had recognized it as the right thing
for me. But unluckily it had already been taken out of the
window, I couldn’t see it anywhere inside, even after trying
my hardest to peer into the shop; to walk into the shop
solely to look at the dinner jacket I didn’t dare, so we had to
go back in the same state of indecision. But I had the feeling
that the futility of this journey had already cast a curse on
the future dinner jacket; at least I used the annoyance of all
this hemming and hawing as an excuse for sending the tailor
away with some small order or other, and a few words of
comfort about the dinner jacket, and stayed behind, tired, to
listen to my mother’s reproaches, shut out forever—every¬
thing that happened to me was forever—from girls, making
an elegant appearance, and balls. The happiness which I felt
about it at the same time made me feel miserable, and be¬
sides I was afraid I had made a bigger fool of myself in front
of my tailor than any of his customers had ever done.”
Franz attended the German elementary school in the
Fleischmarkt, and then the German grammar school in the
Old Town Square. The latter was considered the most severe
in Prague. The attendance was small. In its roomy class¬
rooms, as there were not many pupils, naturally each one’s
turn came quicker and each one was asked more questions
13
than in other luckier, lazier secondary schools. The masters
were feared. I went to St. Stephen’s grammar school, and
didn’t know Kafka at that time, but dark rumors reached me
by other routes. I saw the chillingly elegant rooms when I
went to the optional French lessons, which were given for us
pupils from St. Stephen’s grammar school also in the Kinsky
Palace, where the premises of the Old Town grammar school
were. Years afterwards Franz sometimes told me he passed in
mathematics only “by crying during the examination,” and
thanks to the Hugo Bergmann mentioned above in the ex¬
cerpt from the diary, who let him copy his homework. Other¬
wise he seems to have been a really good pupil. At the Old
Town grammar school there were only good pupils, the
others were mercilessly weeded out in the lower classes.
According to his mother, he was a weak, delicate child,
generally serious, but nevertheless ready for an occasional
prank—a child who read a lot, and didn’t want to take any
exercise—this last is in contrast with the older Kafka’s strong
interest in games and physical training.
A photograph of him as a child shows a little boy of about
five, slender, with big, questioning eyes, and a dour, tight-
lipped, self-willed mouth. His black hair combed straight
down nearly to his eyebrows strengthens the impression of
an almost threatening peevishness, with which the limp way
he lets his hands droop is in keeping, but not the carefully
chosen sailor suit, the big hat, and the walking stick.
Franz played very little with his sisters, the difference in
their ages was too great and seems rather to have led to oc¬
casional quarrels. Only for his parents’ birthdays little Franz
wrote plays for his sisters. They were acted in the family
circle, the custom lasted until they were adolescent, the
sisters remember some of the plays and some of the lines to
this day. One of the plays was called “The Equilibrist,” an¬
other one “George of Podebrady,” another “The Photographs
Speak”—of which the family photographs standing on the
console table form the subject. Franz never acted in them,
he was only the author and stage manager. Later he sug¬
gested to his sisters that instead of his things they should do
14
short plays of Hans Sachs which he arranged for them.
It is among the boys he went to school with that we must
look for young Franz’s real associates. The small class con¬
tained a few figures whose importance will appear later.
There was besides Kafka, Hugo Bergmann, of whom we
have already spoken, who in years to come became a famous
philosopher; at present he is professor and rector of the
Hebrew University at Jerusalem. While they were at school
together, although they were in close relationship with each
other, Kafka and Bergmann seem never to have recognized
each other’s true worth. The same is true of Emil Utitz, later
professor of philosophy at Halle and Prague, and of Paul
Kisch, literary historian, and editor of the Neue Freie Presse.
Oskar Poliak was the only one with whom he developed a
more intimate friendship, which we shall have to go into
later.
Of all the impressions of Kafka’s childhood the one that is
of outstanding importance is the grand image of his father-
exaggerated in its grandeur as it undoubtedly is by Kafka’s
natural genius. One of Kafka’s last writings deals with this.
In November 1919, when we were living together in Sche-
lesen near Liboch—that is why I can reconstruct the mood of
those days fairly exactly—he wrote a very circumstantial “Let¬
ter to My Father.” It is hardly a work that one can call a letter
any more, it is a short book, but one that cannot yet be pub¬
lished—at the same time it is certainly one of the most re¬
markable and, for all its simplicity of style, one of the most
difficult of documents dealing with a life-struggle. It is not
easy to get to the bottom of the whole affair; in some passages
it is easy, naturally, to find some correspondence with the
theses of psychoanalysis, but they are confined rather to the
surface of the facts and do not go down to their deeper im¬
plications. For reasons of a personal nature this “Letter to
My Father” cannot yet be given wide publicity. But the few
excerpts and quotations I am able to produce already con¬
tribute something indispensable to the understanding of
Kafka’s development.
Although it is more than a hundred pages long, the letter,
15
 as I can testify from my conversations with Kafka, was in¬
tended actually to be handed to his father, through his
mother, and Kafka was for some time of the opinion that by
this letter he was doing something towards clearing up his
relationship with his father which had become distressingly
stagnant and painfully scabbed over. In reality the opposite
would probably have happened. The explanation of himself
to his father that the letter aimed at would never have been
achieved. And Franz’s mother did not pass on the letter but
gave it back to him, probably with a few comforting words.
Afterwards we never mentioned the whole affair again.
“Dearest Father,” it begins, “you once asked me why
I maintain I am afraid of you. As usual, I didn’t know how to
answer you, partly because of this very fear I have of you,
and partly because the explanation of this fear involves so
many details that when I am talking I can’t keep half of them
together.” After this there follows a most detailed analysis of
the relations of this peculiar father to this peculiar child, and
vice versa; then comes a most severe self-analysis which
grows, episode by episode, into a short autobiography, with
special reference, arising naturally from his theme, to the
years of his childhood. That is why this is just the place to
quote some passages from the letter.
Kafka always set very great store by autobiographical
sketches, as one can see not only from the fact that he kept a
diary over long periods of his life, but also from remarks such
as the following: “My urge to write my autobiography would
be the first thing I should set to work and obey the moment
I managed to get free of office work. Some such drastic
change I should have to have in view as a temporary goal,
when I begin to write, to be able to give some direction to
the mass of events. Any other change than this, which is itself
so terribly unlikely, that would lift me out of the rut, I cannot
foresee. But after that the writing of my autobiography
would be sheer pleasure, because it would go so easily, just
like writing down one’s dreams, and yet would have an en¬
tirely different result, a great result that would influence me
forever, and that would at the same time be accessible to the
16
understanding and feeling of everyone else.” A letter to me,
in which the idea of “tracing the outline of my [i.e. Kafka’s]
life with complete decisiveness” was very favorably consid¬
ered, points in the same direction: “The next step would be
that I would hold myself together, not fritter myself away in
meaningless speculation, keep a clear vision.” Thus in the
case of Kafka, the desire to set his extremely complex soul in
order far outweighed the ordinary pleasure a writer feels in
revealing his most intimate feelings, which Thomas Mann,
in his essay “Goethe and Tolstoy” once so beautifully de¬
scribed as a writer’s inevitable failing and unconditional
claim on the world, to be loved with his weaknesses as well as
with his virtues. “The remarkable thing is that the world ac¬
knowledges and admits his claim.” The fight that Kafka him¬
self fought for his own perfection (he would have said
against his egregious imperfection) was so hard, that he
could not dream of dramatizing or “arranging” things for the
outside world.
True as it is that the “Letter to My Father” was written
solely for the sake of the matter in hand, just as true is it that
its contents, its subjective truth when confronted with the
sober facts, remains in spite of everything ambiguous and
ambuscaded. Here and there I feel the perspective is dis¬
torted, unsupported assumptions are occasionally dragged
in and made to fit the facts; on what appear to be negligible,
immediate reactions, a whole edifice is built up, the ramifica¬
tions of which it is impossible to grasp as a whole, which in
fact in the end definitely turns on its own axis and contradicts
itself, and yet manages to stand erect on its own foundation.
At the end, indeed, the letter pretends the father himself is
speaking and answering the letter in these words: “While I
put the whole blame on you as frankly as I mean it, you on
the other hand insist you are over-clever’ and 'over-sensi¬
tive’ and want to declare me, too, free from any blame.
Naturally you are only seemingly successful in the latter—
which is all you want—and reading between the lines, despite
all your fine words about being, and nature, and opposition,
and helplessness, it appears that I am really the aggressor
17
 and everything you did was only in self-defense. So now by
your dishonesty you have already achieved enough, for you
have proved three things; firstly, that you are innocent; sec¬
ondly, that I am guilty; and thirdly, that out of sheer great¬
ness of heart you are prepared not only to forgive me, but,
what is much more, and much less, even to go further and
prove, and try and convince yourself, that I—contrary to the
truth of course—am also innocent. That ought to be enough
for you, but it isn’t. You have in fact made up your mind that
you want to live on me altogether. I admit we fight each
other, but there are two kinds of fight. There is the chivalrous
fight, where two independent opponents test their strength
against each other, each stands on his own, loses for himself,
wins for himself. And there is the fight of the vermin, which
not only bite, but at the same time suck the blood on which
they live. They are really the professional soldier, and that is
what you are. You cannot stand up to life, but in order to set
yourself up in it comfortably, free from care, and without
self-reproach, you prove that I robbed you of your capacity
to stand up to life, and shoved it in my pocket.” (This, by the
way, is an exposition in the light of which the genesis of
Franz Kafka’s “vermin story ’’—The Metamorphosis—becomes
clearer, as also that of the short story “The Verdict.”)
Just as in these lines of the last paragraph, the main theme
of the whole letter remains unchangedly the same—it is only
the question of who is guilty that takes on a different aspect
in the last paragraph—and might be formulated thus: the
weakness of the son is opposed to the strength of the father,
who made himself entirely, and who in the consciousness of
his achievement and of his strong, unbroken self through
which this achievement was made, regards himself as the
standard measure of the world, and that with the right of a
naive man who has never thought things out, and followed
only his own instincts as far as principles are concerned—in
fact to some extent a man of instinct. But a constant aware¬
ness that the opposites are not so glaring and clear-cut as the
“Letter,” for all its efforts to do justice to the complexities of
life, cannot help but portray them-this awareness which is
18
 something one takes for granted in any work of Kafka’s—
pervades the whole text, and stands out clearest in the words
of the last sentence, which are the most reconciliatory in the
discussion: “Naturally, in reality things cannot fit together so
neatly as the examples in my letter, life is more than a game
of patience; but were the proofs to be corrected on the lines
suggested in my objection, a proof-reading which I am un¬
able and unwilling myself to carry out in detail, something
so near the truth would be arrived at that it might comfort
us both a little, and make our lives and our deaths easier.”
Apart from this reservation, the contrast between the two
characters is sharply drawn. The characteristics Franz Kafka
inherited from the two families he was born into, the odd,
shy, quiet people of his mother’s side (Lowy) and the re¬
alistic father’s family, he himself describes as follows: “Just
compare us! Myself, to put it as briefly as possible, a Lowy
with a certain amount of Kafka at the bottom, which how¬
ever can just not be got going by the Kafka will-to-live, to do
business, to conquer.... You, on the other hand, a real Kafka
with your strength, health, appetite, decision, eloquence,
self-satisfaction, superiority over the world, endurance, pres¬
ence of mind, knowledge of the world, a certain largeness,
and naturally with all the weaknesses and failings that go
with these qualities, and in which your temperament and
sometimes your temper encourage you.” Compare with this
the characteristics listed in another passage of what Franz
considered he inherited from his mother’s family: “Obsti¬
nacy, sensitivity, a sense of justice, restlessness.” What a
gamut of contrasts, that can only be described as tragic,
from this point to the vital portrait of the father that appears
once more towards the end of the “Letter,” in the passage
where Kafka speaks of the failure of his attempts to get mar¬
ried. A comparison is made between the father and the son,
according to which the father has everything he wants and
the son nothing: “The chief obstacle to my marriage is the
conviction, which I can no longer eradicate, that to keep a
family, particularly to be the head of one, what is necessary
is just what I recognize you have—just everything together,
19
 good and bad, just as it is organically united in you, viz.
strength and contempt for others, health and a certain ex¬
cess, eloquence and stand-offishness, self-confidence and dis¬
satisfaction with everybody else, superiority to the world
and tyranny, knowledge of the world and distrust of most
people in it, and then advantages with no disadvantage at¬
tached, such as industry, endurance, presence of mind, fear¬
lessness. Of all these qualities I had comparatively almost
nothing, or only very little, so how should I dare to marry
under such conditions when I saw that even you had a hard
struggle in your married life, and even failed, as far as your
children were concerned? Of course I didn’t put this question
to myself in so many words, nor answer it in so many words,
otherwise I should have fallen into the ordinary way of think¬
ing on the subject, and discovered other men who are differ¬
ent from you—Uncle R., to mention one in your own circle—
and who have married all the same, and at least not collapsed
under the strain, which is already a great deal, and would
have been enough for me. But I just didn’t ask myself this
question, but lived it ever since my childhood. I didn’t, in
fact, examine myself from the standpoint of marriage, but
from the standpoint of every little thing; from the standpoint
of every little thing you convinced me, as I have tried to ex¬
plain, both by your example and by the way you brought me
up, of my incapacity, and what turned out to be true for
every little thing, and proved you were right, was bound of
course, to be monstrously true for the greatest thing—
marriage.”
Here it seems impossible any longer to reject the connec¬
tion with Freud’s theories, particularly with his explanation
of the “subconscious.”
And yet I hesitate and must utter my protests against find¬
ing connections in this facile way, not least of all because
Franz Kafka knew these theories very well and considered
them always as a very rough and ready explanation which
didn’t do justice to detail, or rather to the real heartbeat of
the conflict. In the following lines I shall therefore try to give
a different slant on the facts, and refer to the example of
20
Kleist. First of all it must be admitted that Kafka’s own re¬
mark that he had never put into so many words or into the
ordinary way of thinking,” but rather “lived ever since
childhood” the question that was bound up with the su¬
periority of the father which the son so tremendously felt,
seems to confirm the psychoanalyst in his usual method of
approach. The same thing applies to the picture he gives of
his father’s “method of bringing up children,” and the many
entries in Franz Kafka’s diary on the subject of how badly
he was brought up, and the letters in the appendix on the
bringing up of children written with reference to an essay of
Swift’s (“children should be brought up only away from
their families, not by their parents”) represent the further
thematic development of this subject.
Almost the whole of the lettei; is devoted to the way his
father brought him up. “I was a nervous child,” said Kafka,
“but I was certainly sulky, too, as children are; it is also true
that my mother spoiled me, but I can’t believe that I was a
particularly difficult child, I can’t believe that a friendly
word, taking me quietly by the hand, a friendly glance,
would not have got me to do anything that was wanted. Now
at bottom you are a kind and gentle man (what I am about
to say doesn’t contradict this; I am talking only of the ap¬
pearance you presented to the child), but not every child has
the patience and the courage to go on looking until it has
found the good side. You can only handle a child in the way
you were created yourself, with violence, noise, and temper,
and in this case moreover you thought this was the most
suitable way, because you wanted to bring me up to be a
strong, brave boy.”
The “Letter” recalls with uncanny penetration an insig¬
nificant punishment in earliest childhood, which was con¬
cerned anyhow with the child’s moral rather than bodily
welfare, and yet made an ineradicable impression on the son,
because he recognized “that I was such a mere nothing to
him.” The slighting criticisms that the father let drop of the
child’s little pleasures, of the friends he went about with, of
his whole way of living and behavior, came to be felt as an
21
enormous burden, and led finally to the child s despising
himself. The father himself didn’t follow his own criticisms
and rules too strictly, and this very lack of logic appears to
the son, on looking back, as a sign of unruly zest for life and
unbreakable will-power. “You had worked yourself up to
such a position by your own strength, that you had unlimited
confidence in your own opinion.... From your armchair you
ruled the world. Your opinion was right, everybody else s
was mad, eccentric, meshuggah, not normal. At the same
time your self-confidence was so great that there was no need
for you to be consistent, and yet you were always right. You
often even happened to have no opinion whatever on a sub¬
ject, in which case any possible opinion on the subject must,
without exception, be wrong. You could swear at the Czechs,
for example, and then at the Germans, and then at the Jews,
not for any particular reason but for every reason, and in the
end there was nobody left but yourself. For me you devel¬
oped the bewildering effect that all tyrants have whose might
is founded not on reason, but on their own person.”
It must be pointed out here how great a role for Kafka the
principle of authority played, alongside elements of the dig¬
nity of man, that is to say democracy, in The Trial, in The
Castle, in all the short stories and fragments that belong to
The Great Wall of China. One may well know from per¬
sonal experience what a spell can be exerted by self-confident
and irrational personalities, who aren’t troubled about their
principles or their self-contradictions, so long as (a) one
doesn’t see through these contradictions, or (b) one needs the
person as he or she is—as for example a woman one is in love
with—and therefore has to put up with him or her under all
circumstances. .The question arises, posed in sober arrogance,
“What did Kafka need his father for?” Or, better put, “Why
was he not able to break away from him, although he
adopted a critical attitude towards him in so far as (a) of
the above reasons for feeling dependent on a person doesn’t
apply—why didn’t he seek refuge in that distance which so
many children feel obliged to put between themselves and
their parents; or rather, since he did manage to put that
22
distance between himself and his father, and in later years
hardly spoke to him, why did he suffer so from this distance
and coldness? Must he not have said to himself that between
two such entirely different characters as his and his father’s
an intimate union was just impossible?” It is true Franz could
understand his father, and not only value him according to
his deserts, but also look on him with loving admiration. But
his father was by his very nature, and of course through no
fault of his own, as Kafka emphasizes again and again in the
“Letter,” but just because of his nature, that is to say, uncon¬
ditionally and finally, barred from any understanding at¬
tempt to probe his son’s peculiar character. In how many
talks did I not try and make clear to my friend—whose deep¬
est wound, I knew, without yet having seen the diary, was just
this—how he overestimated his father, and how stupid it is to
despise oneself. It was all useless, the torrent of arguments
that Kafka produced (when he didn’t prefer, as he frequently
did, to keep quiet) could really shatter and repel me for a
moment.
Still today I feel that the fundamental question, “What
difference could his father’s approval make to Kafka?” is put
not from Kafka’s point of view but from an outsider’s. The
fact that he did need it existed once and for all as an innate,
irrefutable feeling, and its effects lasted to the end of his life
as “a general load of fear, weakness, and self-contempt.” In
the “Letter” his father’s verdict is given a wholly dispropor¬
tionate power of deciding the life or death of all Kafka’s
efforts (cf. the short story “The Verdict”). The “Letter” says,
“Courage, decision, confidence, pleasure in this or that could
not hold out to the end, if you were opposed to it, or even if
your opposition were only presumed—and presumed it might
well be almost whatever I did. ... In your presence—you are
an excellent orator, the moment it is a question of anything
that concerns you—I began to stammer and stutter, even that
was too much for you, so finally I shut up, at first probably
out of pig-headedness, later because I could neither think
nor speak in front of you. And as it was you who really
brought me up, it affected my whole life in all its aspects.”
23
At this point a remarkable parallel forces itself on one’s at¬
tention which one might do well to consider before going on
to the next stage—“infantile complex”: it seems that Kleist,
too, suffered from the same affliction of stuttering. Kafka s
remark that he stuttered, can, in any case, only refer to his
dealings with his father. When talking to anyone else, when
he did bring himself to talk, that is, and broke his usual si¬
lence, he talked absolutely freely, easily, elegantly, and with
a winning wealth and flow of ideas that was often playful,
always astoundingly natural, and anything but “stammer-
• —w
ing.
The result of his father’s upbringing was, according to
the “Letter” (and in this passage Kafka provides his own
commentary to the conclusion of his novel The Trial): “In
front of you I lost my self-confidence and exchanged it for
an infinite sense of guilt. In the recollection of this infinity I
once wrote about someone, quite truly, ‘He is afraid the
shame will even live on after him.’ ” Kafka goes on to con¬
strue his life after this as a series of efforts to break loose
from his father’s sphere, to reach fields where he would be
safe from his father’s influence. It is worth noting that
Kafka, who when passing judgment on literary work con¬
demned nothing so severely as “constructions placed on
things” which, lacking any breath of organic life that blos¬
soms forth in ever unexpected directions, cling desperately
to arbitrarily rigid and abstract combinations, himself falls
into placing “constructions” on things, and dovetails into
them, alongside what is genuine, also things that are half-
true or exaggerated. That is why he wants to lump all his
literary work together as an “attempt to get away from my
father,” as though his pleasure in art and his joy in creating
would not have grown of their own accord out of his own
powers. To those who knew him closely, at least, he pre¬
sented quite a different picture from that of a man haunted
by the “father-image”; they had the picture of a man glow¬
ingly under the impulsion of form, the desire and power to
mold things, the urge to know, interest in observing life, and
the love of humanity. One must admit, of course, that part
24
of the picture was what he thus describes, in deeply moving
terms, in the “Letter to My Father”: “My writings were about
you, in them I merely poured out the lamentations I could
not pour out on your breast. It was a farewell deliberately
drawn out, save that, although you, it is true, imposed it, the
direction it was given I determined.”
It is under this same aspect, of an attempt at escape, that
Kafka, in the “Letter” looks at other spheres of his life—the
family, friendship, Judaism, profession, finally the two at¬
tempts he made at getting married. “My opinion of myself
depended more on you than on anything else, such as, for
example, on any outward success.... Where I lived I was an
outcast, condemned, defeated, and although I struggled my
utmost to flee elsewhere, it was labor in vain, because I was
trying to do something that was impossible, that was beyond
my strength except for a few insignificant exceptions.” After
a general survey of the conditions of his boyhood, Kafka ar¬
rived at the following depressing characteristic of himself, a
characteristic described probably much too pessimistically
through retrospection, and under the influence of the “father-
construction” he so stubbornly clings to in the “Letter.” He
asserts he learnt little or nothing while at his secondary
school—an assertion I cannot but dispute from my own pri¬
vate knowledge, for example of his knowledge of Greek, for
we read Plato together at the university—and then continues,
“Ever since I can remember I was so concerned about the
problem of defending my spiritual existence that everything
else was indifferent to me. Jewish schoolboys in our country
are often peculiar, you can find the most improbable things
among them, but my cool, hardly hidden, imperturbable,
childishly helpless, at times almost ridiculous, self-satisfied
animal indifference of a child ‘sufficient unto himself,’ and
yet coolly fantastic, I have never seen anywhere else, but all
the same it was my only protection against my nerves col¬
lapsing through fear and my sense of guilt.”
The “attempts to escape” will be dealt with in their proper
place, though not altogether from the standpoint of the
“Letter to My Father.” Only his accounts of how he tried
25
Judaism as a way of escape from his father’s domination
might find room here, because they are of vital importance
for his youth, and have a further general significance both
for Kafka’s recognition of Judaism during that period of
transition, and for his later religious development. “I found
just as little escape from you in the Jewish faith. Here, in it¬
self, was a possible escape, nay more, it would have been
possible for us to have found each other in Judaism, or at
least for us to have found in it a point from which we could
have traveled the same road. But what kind of Judaism did I
get from you! In the course of the years, I have had three
different attitudes towards it.
“When I was a child I agreed with you, and reproached
myself for not going often enough to the synagogue, not
keeping the fasts, etc. ... I thought I was doing you an in¬
justice, not myself, and the feeling of guilt, which was always
ready to hand, overwhelmed me.
“Later, when I was a young man, I couldn’t understand
how you, with the insignificant fragments of Judaism you
possessed, could reproach me—out of godliness, as you put
it—with not making an effort to put the same insignificant
fragments into practice. It was really, as far as I could see,
nothing, a joke, not even a joke. On four days in the year you
went to the synagogue, where you were at least nearer in
spirit to the indifferent than to those who took it all seriously,
went through the prayers patiently as a formality, sometimes
astonished me by being able to show me in the prayer book
the place which was just being chanted, otherwise, pro¬
vided—that was the chief thing—I was only in the synagogue,
I could twist and turn about as much as I liked. So I used to
yawn and fiddle the long hours away—the only place where I
have been as bored later on was, I believe, when I went to
dancing lessons—and tried my best to enjoy the few little dis¬
tractions there were, such as, for example, the opening of the
Ark of the Covenant, which always reminded me of a
shooting-range at a fair, where there was also a box with a
door which opened if you hit the bull’s-eye, except that there
something interesting came out, whereas here there were al-
26
ways just the same old dolls with no heads. Apart from every¬
thing else I was also always terrified there, not only, as you
can understand, of the crowds of people one had to come
into close contact with, but also because you once casually
mentioned that I myself might be called on to read the Torah.
For years I trembled at the thought of it. Otherwise I was
not essentially disturbed in my boredom, except perhaps
by the Bar Mitzvah, which anyhow only meant a lot of silly
learning by heart, in other words led only to a ridiculous kind
of examination; and again, as far as you were concerned, when
you were called on to read the Torah, which as far as I could
feel was a purely social affair, and got through it well, or
when you stayed on in the synagogue for the Memorial Serv¬
ice, and I was sent away, which for a long time, obviously ow¬
ing to my being sent away, and a complete lack of any deeper
interest in it, left one with the feeling, of which I was hardly
conscious even, that there was something indecent about it.
That is how it was in the synagogue. At home it was even
more miserable, and confined itself to the first Seder night,
which always turned rather into a comedy with fits of laugh¬
ter, brought about it is true by the influence of the elder
children. (Why did you have to give in to this influence?
Because you yourself had produced it, of course.) So that
was the stuff that was handed on to me to build my faith out
of, except perhaps your hand pointing to ‘the sons of F. the
millionaire,’ who were in the synagogue with their father on
the High Holy Days. What better there was to do with such
material than get rid of it as quickly as possible I couldn’t
imagine; in fact, just getting rid of it seemed to me the most
godly thing to do with it.
“But still later in my life I saw things differently again, and
understood how you could believe I was wickedly betraying
you in this matter too. You really did bring something of
Judaism with you out of your tiny little ghetto-like country
parish; it wasn’t much, and a little of that got lost in the city
and in the army, but all the same there was just enough left
of impressions and memories of youth to satisfy your kind of
Judaism, particularly as you didn’t need much help of that
27
kind, seeing that you came of a very sturdy stock, and, as far
as you were concerned, could hardly be shaken by religious
doubts unless they got mixed up too much with social
doubts. Fundamentally the faith that guided your life was
that you believed in the absolute rightness of the opinions of
a certain class of Jewish businessmen, and really, since these
opinions were part of your origin, it was but belief in your¬
self. There was enough Judaism in that, too, but as far as
your child was concerned, it was not enough to be passed on,
it trickled away drop by drop as you tried to hand it on.
Partly they were impressions of childhood, which are in¬
communicable, partly it was your dreaded person. It was
impossible, too, to make a child driven to over-critical obser¬
vation by sheer fear understand that the few insignificant
details you performed in the name of Judaism, with an indif¬
ference which matched their insignificance, could have a
higher meaning. For you they had a meaning, as little memo¬
ries of old times, and that is why you wanted to hand them
on to me, but could do so, since they had no more intrinsic
value for you yourself, only by persuasion or threats; that
could not succeed, on the one hand, and on the other hand,
couldn’t fail, since you didn’t realize the weakness of your
position in this matter, to make you furious with me for what
you thought was my intransigeance.
“Anyway, the whole business is no isolated phenomenon,
it’s the same with most of this Jewish generation of the transi¬
tion period, that has migrated from the country, which is still
comparatively religious, into the towns; it was a natural re¬
sult, only that just in our case, where there is certainly no lack
of bitternesses, just this one more, which is painful enough,
had to be added. On the other hand, you must believe, just
as I do, in your innocence in this point, too, but you must ex¬
plain your innocence by your nature and the state of the
times, but not simply by outward circumstances, and say for
example that you had too much other work and too many
other worries to have been able to bother your head about
such things. In this way you always manage to twist your
undoubted innocence into an undeserved reproach against
28
other people. The argument can in this case, as in all the oth¬
ers, very easily be refuted. It wouldn’t have been a question
of giving your children any particular lessons, but of the ex¬
ample of your own life. Had your Judaism been stronger,
your example would have been more compelling, that is ob¬
vious, and this again is not at all a reproach but only a ward¬
ing off of your reproaches. You have lately been reading
Franklin’s memoirs of his youth. I really gave it you to read
on purpose, not, as you ironically remarked, for the sake of a
short passage on vegetarianism, but because of the descrip¬
tion it contains of the relationship between the author and
his father, and the relationship between the author and his
son, as it finds expression precisely in these memoirs written
for the son. I don’t want to call particular attention to any
details here.
“I got a certain delayed confirmation of this conception of
your Judaism from your attitude in the last few years, when
it seemed to you that I was taking more interest in Jewish
questions. Since you have as a matter of course a dislike for
any of my occupations, and particularly for the nature of my
interest in anything, you developed a dislike in this case too.
And yet for all that, one might have expected you would make
a little exception in this case. It was, after all, the Judaism of
your Jewish faith that was occupying my attention, and
therefore there was a chance of establishing new points of
contact between us. I don’t deny that if you had shown any
interest in them, these things would immediately have be¬
come suspect in my eyes for that reason. I haven’t the slight¬
est intention of affirming that I am any better than you in this
respect. But it never came to the test. Through my agency
Judaism became revolting to you, Jewish writings unread¬
able, they ‘disgusted’ you—that might have meant that you
were insisting that that form of Judaism which you revealed
to me in my childhood was the only right one, one must go
no further. But that you should insist on this point was hardly
imaginable. In that case your ‘disgust’—apart from the fact
that it was felt not against Judaism, but against my own per¬
son—could only mean that you unconsciously realized the
29
weakness of your Judaism and my Jewish upbringing, did
not wish to be reminded of it in any shape or form, and re¬
acted to all reminders with frank hatred. In any case, your
negative high opinion of my new interest in things Jewish
was very exaggerated; in the first place, it brought your curse
with it; and secondly, what was vital to its growth was the
fundamental relationship with my fellow-men, in my case, in
fact, it was fatal.”

Alongside the father, the mother appears “in the turmoil

of childhood as the emblem of reason.” Her un-self-assertive
attitude towards the father the son complains of, but also
fully understands, just as much from the point of view of
love for her husband as from the point of view of the com¬
mon sense of giving way to a man who anyhow cannot stand
being gainsaid. But the idea that by doing this the parents
formed a unity, a common front against their son, which the
mother could leave only secretly even to show her love for
him, that idea has left a deep mark on all Kafka’s work. You
can find it everywhere, look at the short story The Married
Couple; if you look at it from this angle, it becomes one of
Kafka’s most inspiring and personal works. Every word in it,
rightly understood, is full of clues, from the complaints about
business in the beginning to the words towards the end in
which Mr. N.’s wife reminds the visitor, or rather intruder,
of his own mother, and causes him to utter these words:
“Whatever you may say, a mother can do wonders. She puts
together again what we have wrecked. I lost her when I was
a child.” And the final note, “Oh, how many business calls
come to nothing, and yet we must continue to shoulder the
burden.”
The odd thing is not that Kafka very early in life felt his
father’s character was something foreign to his own, although
at the same time something highly worthy of admiration for
its vitality and strength. The odd thing is that even as he was
growing older he still wished above all for his father’s ap¬
proval, which coidd never be granted. “You have an un¬
usually beautiful kind of quiet, satisfied smile, such as one
30
seldom sees, which can make the recipient quite happy,”
says Kafka in the Letter. He reckons up the moments when
he felt close to his father: “It was not often, of course, but it
was wonderful. For example, when I used to see you on a hot
summer afternoon tired after lunch, sleeping a little in the
shop, with your elbow on the desk, or when you came on a
Sunday, worn out, to have a little fresh air with us in the
country; or when mother was dangerously ill and you clung
to the bookcase, shaken with sobs; or when, during my last
illness, you came softly to my room to see me, stopped at the
door, just stuck your head in, and out of consideration for me,
only waved a hand to me. On occasions like this one lay
down and cried for joy, and is crying now as one writes about
it.” . . . He dedicated one of his books, The Country Doctor,
to his father. Franz often recounted the reply with which his
father received the book—he certainly meant no harm by it
—his father said nothing but, “Put it on the table by my bed.”
And what a melancholy ring the sentence in the diary has,
with which Franz closes a description of an evening, of an
act with which he was for once completely satisfied: after a
great deal of trouble he had arranged, he thought with a
great deal of prudence and success, a recitation evening in
the Jewish town hall for a poor Polish Jewish actor. He him¬
self made the introductory—and significant—speech. (It was
the only lecture he ever gave—otherwise one can only record
a reading from his own works at Munich, and a reading from
Kleist’s Michael Kohlhaas in the Toynbee Hall in Prague.)
But he ends the description sadly with the words in brackets,
as though spoken from the depth of his soul, “My parents
were not there.”
Life in Kafka’s parents’ house has many resemblances to
that in Proust’s house (Leon Pierre-Quint: Marcel Proust, sa
vie, son oeuvre). “Son pere, parti tot le matin, ne voyait
presque pas son fils.” On the other hand, the mother: “une
femme douce .... elle veillait avec soin sur lui, lui pardonnait
d’avance ses fantaisies, les habitudes de nonchalance aux-
quelles il s’abandonnait.” If one were to investigate what
they had in common in the way their parents brought them
31
up, one might perhaps also come upon the common roots of
the similarity of outlook and style of two authors who were
contemporaries, and yet never heard of one another—a fact
that refers an investigator trying to co-ordinate his facts back
to the darkness of the general world chaos. The unusual pre¬
ciseness of the descriptions, the love of detail, a peculiarity I
might describe as “copy fever” (Akribismus)— the feeling of
being spellbound in the family circle, even certain analogies
of race (Proust’s mother was a Jewess) and even of outward
fate—all this challenges one again and again to make the
comparison, although of course Proust’s cosmopolitan sur¬
roundings and Kafka’s bourgeois Prague led to important
differences in their development.
For cases such as those of Proust, Kleist, and Kafka, who
all their life long never grew out of the impressions of their
childhood, and the dominating factor of their family and the
family tradition, the psychoanalysts have their scheme of a
subconscious erotic mother-complex, and a subconscious
hate of the father. But for the infantile complex there is
surely—not that I wish to exclude the co-responsibility of mo¬
tives which are relevant from the psychoanalytical side—the
simpler explanation that the parents are the -first problem a
child comes up against, the first resistance he has to assert
himself against; his arguments with them are the model for
all his later fights in life. A man begins his duel with life and
the world. First round: his parents. Then life sends other
opponents for him to stand up to; school-fellows, teachers,
fellow-citizens, the public, the unfathomable world of
women. Nothing but enemies—or at least nothing but oppo¬
nents, among whom it is hard to find those who mean well;
and finding diem is already itself a battle, an activity, a task,
a life-test imposed upon men. The way in which the man and
fighter is able to get through his first round is an indication
of his future, and can be considered as a symbol of the fu¬
ture. By the researcher the beginnings will rightly be re¬
garded as the real roughcasts or representations of further
phases of his life, and in fact of his life as a whole altogether.
While the psychoanalyst supposes that a man draws the pic-
32
ture he has of God involuntarily after his own father, the
opposite possibility (which Heinz Politzer was the first to
point out) cannot be excluded that it is just sensitive people
like Kafka who have their idea of “father” enriched, enlarged,
and their horizon filled by their experience of God (or rather,
as I have tried to show here, by the experience of the uni¬
verse which opposes and fights against them as they grow
older).
“Oh, that I knew the way, the dear way back to the land of
childhood,” sings Klaus Groth in a poem set to music by
Brahms. This longing occurs only as an occasional episode in
the case of the average man, perhaps as a sign of weariness
at the end of a hard day—which raises the question as to
whether a man who is tired doesn’t perhaps show his char¬
acter more truly than an ambitious man, or a man keyed up
by the necessity of earning his living. But alongside this epi¬
sodic “back to the land of childhood,” there exists too the
true infantile complex, the deciding of a man’s fate by the
events of his young days, from which a certain type of man
never breaks loose for the whole of his life.
The child trusts his parents and wants his parents to trust
him too. This is the point out of which arises one of the first
great conflicts to which the soul of man is exposed. Instead
of mutual trust, the world offers something entirely differ¬
ent-struggle, war. Of how deep and glowing an emotional
experience this first collision with parents and the family
may be, the life of a typical infantile poet, Kleist, is an ex¬
ample in the grand manner. All Kleist’s days the thought
hung over him, “What will the family—the extension of the
parent-milieu—say about my way of life? Will they trust me?”
Of course, the discrepancy between Kleist’s old Prussian
family, which considered fame could be won only on the
field of battle or in the seats of government, and the delicate,
emotional, unstable poet who was at the same time, one can
only say, tyrannized by the highest ethic principles, was
enormous. He knew that in the eyes of his family his verses
and dramas meant not much more than an immoral excess,
the work of a ne’er-do-well. Kafka read Kleist’s letters with
33
 special interest, and made note of the passages which show
that Kleist’s family looked on the poet as “a completely use¬
less member of the human community, who deserved no fur¬
ther consideration,” and remarked with silent irony that on
the centenary of his death, the family laid on Kleist’s grave
a wreath with the inscription, “To the best of his breed.”
The hearty man is inclined, shrugging his shoulders and
rather disdainfully, to gloss over how intensely the sensitive
man looks for confirmation of himself, and of his innermost
being, for faith and acceptance, to his own family and breaks
down when he feels that he isn’t understood in his own home.
The hearty man, you see, soon reaches a point in his develop¬
ment when he says to himself—rightly or wrongly—“Oh,
what do I care; my family is unteachable, incorrigible. But
the world is wide. There are other courts of appeal after all.
I shall show them what I am worth, and not give a damn
what that lot at home think of me. . . Here again, though,
we have a glimpse of the tragi-comedy of life. For in fact
your hearty man, who gives up trying to win the trust of his
family, has not gained anything very much over the sensi¬
tive man. The conflicts that the “wide world”—alas, it soon
becomes so narrow—holds in store for him, are the same, al¬
most to a t, as the first one, in which one begs for trust and
doesn’t get it. Whether it is your friend or your boss, the one
you love above everything else, or simply your neighbor that
has just one little matter to settle with you; over and over,
you would like to be recognized according to your own self,
your own person, your own heart’s inclination—but they al¬
ways ask only what you have done, and really, if you look at
it rationally, they have nothing else by which they can judge
your state of mind except the manifestations of that state of
mind. But you don’t want to be judged, you want people to
have faith in you. For every man—just like every god—de¬
mands faith on every side of him. The soul can only blossom
forth to its sublime and rare capacities when it feels it is
being met with faith.
This question of faith is so much the hub of things, that
one philosopher—Felix Weltsch—has described the “decision
34
 of faith as the foundation of all ethics. One cannot prove
that the world as a whole has any meaning, or that it is the
work of a good spirit, or that it is meaningless and wicked.
This is a thing that one has only to believe or reject, with no
proof whatsoever. In exactly the same way, essentially, the
being, the virtue of every man is either believed or rejected,
without any.proof. For just in this field exact proof cannot be
produced: what a man has done is subject to conflicting
judgments, and often what is most useful comes from the
most corrupt soul. Thus the first conflict—the vain striving to
win the faith of the family—is the pre-formation of all the
conflicts of life that follow it and at the same time includes
them all. This shrugging of shoulders over the infantiles who
are caught up in this very first conflict, in the van of the battle
as one might say, is nevertheless not so entirely justified, as
it appears to be at first sight. These “unpractical” people per¬
haps curtail many a long chain of doubt and distress which
would only lead into the void; they are, as it turns out in the
end, not only more delicately sensitive, but also nearer truth
and the deepest understanding. That is why the picture of
the world given by an “infantile” poet such as Kleist was,
moves us so: infantilism is no weakness in his case; it is only
a more honest, a more serious comprehension of the fatal
fundamental constellation of existence, in which we all stand
opposed to one another, all mistrusting one another, each one
with the secret plea in his heart that one should after all have
faith in him, even though he can give no proof of himself.
What a number of moving situations Kleist1 found to work
up this one eternal situation, in which someone has fallen
into the most shameful disgrace, in which every outward cir¬
cumstance tells against him, and in which nevertheless with
the utter self-surrender of a clear conscience he demands
that we do not condemn him. I even have the feeling that all
Kleist’s work is centered round this one point. The ideal
image of his faith is Kathchen von Heilbronn. But just as
Katchen has faith in her knight, Penthesilea wants Achilles
to sense her love though all the appearances condemn her.
1 And Kafka also: cf. Amerika.
35
 “If only you had not mistrusted me” are her last words. And
Alkmene before the husband who spurns her. Eve (in The
Broken Jug) before her fiance, the apparently so cruel elec¬
tor before the Prince of Homburg—they all stand there bur¬
dened with acts difficult to explain away; dark, guilty, at the
very least not good acts, and yet they are innocent and have
no more heartfelt wish than that their lovers should recog¬
nize their enormous love. It is the fundamental situation of
humanity with which, in Kleist’s case, the situation of his
own purely personal life grew commensurate. He had the
wickedness to write verse instead of legal documents—but
underneath this naughtiness and levity his family should
recognize that he was a proper fellow after all. The most
moving symbol he created is this: the Marquise von O. be¬
comes pregnant (just as genius inspires a work in the soul
of the artist), she doesn’t know how it happened, medical
evidence is to the most positive degree against her, and yet
she is innocent. Kleist is extremely inventive in piling up the
evidence of guilt around his heroine with every possible
argument, like the faggots round the stake of a martyr. The
lightning that tears the clouds to rags and reveals blinding,
snow-white innocence is all the brighter. Hence the over¬
powering pathos of the scene in which the father of the
Marquise von O. realizes the full purity of her soul, and begs
her forgiveness. What boldness guided the writer’s pen, and
made him—long before Freud—set down these words which
one cannot read without being shaken to the core of one’s
being:
“The daughter motionless, her head leaning back, her eyes
shut fast, in her father’s arms . . . while the latter, sitting in
his armchair, his wide eyes full of shining tears, pressed long,
hot, and hungry kisses on her mouth, just like a lover! The
daughter said nothing; he said nothing; but he sat with his
face bent over her, as over the face of the first girl he ever
loved, and set her mouth right and kissed her. . . .”
How often may Kleist have had visions of such a scene
with all the magic of wishes come true. How often has every
“infantile” shared such or similar dreams with him! That
36
Franz Kafka’s writing has several important features in
common with Kleist’s work, particularly as far as his prose
style is concerned, which cannot at all be explained as a
mere emotional echo, has often been pointed out before. But
so far as I know no one has ever pointed to the spiritual
nearness of their fundamental outlook. This fundamental
standpoint is in the truest sense of the word so much a part
of them both that even in their portraits they resemble each
other, at least in so far as boyishness and purity of features
are concerned. In Kafka’s work, too, one finds the center-
point is “responsibility towards the family”! This is the key
to short stories like The Metamorphosis, “The Verdict,” “The
Stoker,” and to many a detail in other works. Also the peculiar
trick of setting up symbols, which are at the same time abso¬
lutely real life, is a trait common to both writers. The vision
of a lady who before the eyes of her high-born family suffers
the sea-change into a dishonored woman-with-child is by no
means so far from that of the picture of a family son whose
fate is a metamorphosis into a despised species of vermin—
The Metamorphosis.
Ties with the experiences of boyhood, ties with the family,
and a strict tradition that had unconscious after-effects—
which in Kleist’s case was Prussian, refreshed by Kant’s sys¬
tem—in Kafka’s case Jewish ethics of justice, brought to new
life by later studies. On the question of the childlike air of
Kleist’s portrait I put forward for comparison what Kafka
once said to me: “I shall never grow up to be a man, from
being a child I shall immediately become a white-haired
ancient.” He often emphasized and noted in his diary how
young he was always taken to be. A certain temporary mis¬
trust of his sexual capacity is part of the same story—Kleist
reports the same of himself. Further, the overstrain of the
demands they made on themselves, as though both of them
were under an obligation to prove to their families that they
were not good-for-nothings. Franz’s dislike of any kind of
“tutelage,” which plagued him during the last year of his life
in Berlin, when he had parcels of food sent him by his par¬
ents in Prague during the starvation winter of 1923. And
37
Kafka’s highest aim in life could not be better described than
by Kleist’s cry full of yearning: “To farm a field, to plant a
tree, to father a child.” For both of them, one must admit,
life ran far from the farmer’s life and the simple constructive
outlook they desired. The analogy can be carried still further,
and shown to go right into their way of writing, in doing
which sight must naturally not be lost of the fact that Kafka
consciously learned from Kleist’s style. But apart from that,
the community of a special kind of fairy-story-like inventive¬
ness and weaving of a story is certainly to be set down to
their dependence on early days, in which the child casts a
spell on and transforms into a dream-shape everything he
plays with. Both of them really knew “the way back”—and
passed along it often and with pleasure. The crystal-clear
style and realism of detail of both thus turns out to be the
counterbalance and defense of strong natures against this
inclination to dreams and childhood. In the case of both
writers what is fundamentally insoluble, most secret, most
obscure, is related in the clearest, simplest, most clear-cut
words possible.

38
 CHAPTER II

THE UNIVERSITY
S

“TALK comes straight out of his mouth like a walking

stick”—that is the first remark of Kafka’s that I find noted
down in my diary. Kafka was describing with these words
somebody or other—who it was I have long ago forgotten—
who could never be stopped talking.
In this little note of mine I can still feel today my admiring
astonishment at Kafka’s manner. For him nothing was ordi¬
nary, always and everywhere he expressed himself with his
own peculiar gift of pregnant observation and simile. And
this he did in a completely unforced manner without preci¬
osity, with the most charming naturalness.
Of any burden of strained, gloomy, boyhood impressions,
of the decadence or snobbishness which might easily have
offered themselves as escapes from so much depression, of a
troubled or a contrite soul, no one who met Kafka could ob¬
serve any trace. What Kafka set down in the “Letter to My
Father” didn’t seem to exist on the surface—or rather re¬
vealed itself only in hints, and then only in extremely confi¬
dential talks. I only learned of this great sorrow, and to
understand it, by slow degrees. At first sight Kafka was a
healthy young man, admittedly remarkably quiet, observant,
reserved. His spiritual bent was not in the direction of the
morbidly interesting, the bizarre or the grotesque, but in that
of the greatness of nature, the curative, health-giving, sound,
firmly established, simple things.
I have experienced over and over again that admirers of
Kafka who know him only from his books have a completely
false picture of him. They think he must have made a sad,
even desperate impression in company too. The opposite is
the case. One felt well when one was with him. The richness
of his thoughts, which he generally uttered in a cheerful tone,
made him, to put it on the lowest level, one of the most amus-
39
ing of men I ever met, in spite of his shyness, in spite of his
quietness. He talked very little; when there were a lot of peo¬
ple he often didn’t speak for hours on end. But when he did
say something, everybody had to listen immediately, because
it was always something full of meat, something that hit the
nail on the head. And in an intimate conversation his tongue
sometimes ran away with itself in the most astounding man¬
ner. He could be enthusiastic and carried away. There was
no end to our joking and laughing—he liked a good, hearty
laugh, and knew how to make his friends laugh too. More
than that, if one were in a tight corner, one could unhesitat¬
ingly rely on his knowledge of the world, his tact, his advice,
which hardly ever failed to be right. He was a wonderfully
helpful friend. It was only in his own case that he was
perplexed, helpless—an impression that, owing to his self-
controlled bearing, one did not get in personal contact with
him except in rare, extreme cases, but one which is un¬
doubtedly deepened, all the same, when one reads his diary.
The fact that from his books, and above all from his diary,
such a totally different, much more depressing, picture may
be drawn than when it is corrected and supplemented by the
impressions one can add from having lived with him day by
day—that is one of the reasons that persuaded me to write
these memoirs. The portrait-from-life of Kafka that remains
in the memory of our circle stands alongside his writings, and
demands to be taken into account in any final judgment of
him.
I got to know Franz Kafka in my first year at the university,
that is to say in 1902-3,1 suppose as early as the winter term,
1902. Franz, who was a year older than I, was beginning his
second year. After leaving school he first studied chemistry
for a whole fortnight, then he took German for one term, then
law—this last only as a makeshift, with no preference for it, as
with most of us. A plan to continue his German studies in
Munich with Paul Kisch was never carried out. Law he took
up with a sigh because it was the school that involved the
least fixed goal, or the largest choice of goals—the bar, the
civil service—that is to say, the school that put off longest
taking a decision and anyhow didn’t demand any great pref-
40
erence. On the subject of Kafka’s dislike of the study of law,
which he never attempted to conceal, I find the following
entry in his diary (1911): “Out of an old notebook: Now in
the evening, after studying since six o’clock this morning, I
noticed how my left hand clasped the fingers of my right
hand for a few moments, in sympathy.”
In the “Letter to My Father” he connects his choice of pro¬
fession, too, with his feeling of being defeated by his father,
with the “chief thing.” I consider this a later interpretation;
but the kernel, the haziness and aimlessness of our youth can
be clearly glimpsed in Kafka’s words, behind the scaffolding
of interpretation. He writes: “There was no real freedom of
choice of profession for me, I knew: compared with the main
point everything will be as indifferent to me as the subjects I
took in my secondary school, and so the only thing is to find
a profession which will give the widest scope for this indif¬
ference, without hurting my vanity too much. So the law was
the obvious thing. Feeble oppositional attempts of my van¬
ity, of senseless optimism, like my fourteen days’ study of
chemistry, my half-year of reading German, served only to
strengthen my fundamental conviction. So I read law. That
meant that in the few months before the examinations, while
wearing out my nerves at a great rate, intellectually I fed
myself exclusively on sawdust—sawdust, too, which had al¬
ready been chewed by thousands of jaws before me. But in
one sense, this was just to my taste, as in one sense my school¬
ing had been, and later my civil service, because it all fitted
in exactly with my position. In any case, I showed remark¬
able foresight in this case; when I was a mere child I already
had sufficiently clear presentiments about my education and
my profession. I didn’t expect any deliverance in this direc¬
tion, I had already abandoned all hope of any.”
At bottom the state of affairs was this: both of us felt our¬
selves honestly drawn only to creative art, but that we did
not yet admit; furthermore, we had far too high a regard for
art to care to connect it with all the sordidness that lay in the
words and idea of “earning one’s living”—besides we had no
one to guide us, no one who could show us the way, if there
41
was a way at all. We were so without guidance that to both
of us the idea that there could be any other refuge than our
hated studies never occurred seriously. Least of all to me.
Kafka, it is true, had something more like a vague idea—
which recurred in later periods of his life—that one “should
get away from Prague and start on something altogether
different.”
The place of our first meeting was the “Reading and Lec¬
ture Hall for German Students”—the clubroom at that time
was in Ferdinand street, now Narodni. Everyone who ma¬
triculated at a German secondary school in Prague—and in
many places in the provinces—became a member of this big
students’ union as a matter of course unless he was an anti-
Semitic nationalist or a professed Jew. (I myself didn’t take
up Zionism till much later, some ten years after.) The “Hall”
belonged to the German Freedom Party. We didn’t wear any
caps, it is true, but we did wear the black, red, and gold rib¬
bon, with the date of the revolution, 1848. But how faded,
how lukewarm was the memory of this revolution; indeed it
never rose above the horizon. The most important compo¬
nent of the “Hall” was the Hall Committee, between it and
the members there existed a certain antagonism, in fact at
times a kind of “battle,” which, however, invariably ended
in the crushing and utter defeat of the members; for at the
general meeting there always turned up in a body the “cou-
leurs,” the corporations that wore colors, and which be¬
longed to the “Hall” by a very loose tie, and never other¬
wise bothered their heads about the life of the club. For the
voting however they were there in full number and voted
unanimously for the committee list—to our disgust, which we
felt afresh each time, against this voting-machine which was
run according to an exact, preconceived plan by the commit¬
tee’s greaj tactician, Bruno Kafka. They never took any part
whatsoever in the debates, and complaints made by the
despised “chaffinches”—that is to say, those who wore no
colors—against the committee, however justified they might
be, didn’t interest them; they contented themselves with
making their irrevocable wishes known through the mouths
42
of their doughty whips. And the committee remained un¬
shaken in their seats as always.
Franz took no interest in this childishly ambitious game,
it was not until his later years that I first heard him mention
even that he was related to Bruno Kafka—to the accompani¬
ment of his admiration for the man’s energy. And yet it was
the conduct of this Batrachomyomachia that brought us to¬
gether for the first time. The center of resistance to the com¬
mittee was, in fact, the “Section for Literature and Art,”
which led an independent life in some respects, and was de¬
pendent on the vote of the committee only in matters of fi¬
nance—which led to specially violent quarrels; I remember,
for example, that the committee refused to approve the fee,
or at any rate to approve a sufficiently high fee for Detlev
von Liliencron, whom we had invited to lecture in Prague. As
opposed to the committee with its ball-committees and its
“Winers,” we in our section, whether rightly or wrongly, con¬
sidered ourselves the bearers of the spirit. The section held
its regular debates and read papers regularly in its own cir¬
cle. On one of these evenings I, straight from school, made
my debut with a paper on “Schopenhauer and Nietzsche”
which created some stir. As the bitter and fanatical adherent
of Schopenhauer that I then was, and as such I considered
the slightest contradiction of the tenets of the philosopher I
worshipped as nothing less than lese-majeste, I spoke of
Nietzsche quite simply and baldly as a “swindler.” (I have,
by the way, remained to this day true to my antipathy to
Nietzsche, even if with reservations and in a different sense.)
After this paper Kafka, who was a year older, saw me
home. He used to take part in every meeting of the “section,”
but until then we had hardly taken any notice of each other.
It would indeed have been difficult to notice him, because he
so seldom opened his mouth, and because his outward ap¬
pearance was above all deeply unobtrusive—even his elegant
suits, which were mostly dark blue, were as unobtrusive and
reserved as himself. But that evening something about me
seems to have attracted him, he was more communicative
than usual; anyhow the endless conversation that went on
43
while he was seeing me home began with a strong protest
against the extreme uncouthness of my way of putting things.
From that we went on to talking about our favorite authors,
and defended them against one another. I was enthusiastic
about Meyrink. At school I modeled myself on the classics,
and rejected everything “modern,” but in one of the upper
classes I swung round, and at this time in a proper “storm
and stress” mood, I welcomed everything that was out-
of-the-way, unbridled, shameless, cynical, extreme, over¬
caustic. Kafka opposed me with calm and wisdom. For Mey¬
rink he had no time.1 Well, I quoted him “purple passages”
by heart. One from Meyrink’s “Purple Death” compared but¬
terflies to great opened-out books of magic. Kafka turned up
his nose. That sort of thing he considered too farfetched and
much too importunate; everything that suggested that it was
planned for effect, intellectual, or artificially thought up, he
rejected—although he himself never used labels of this kind.
In him there was something of the “softly murmuring voice
of Nature” of which Goethe spoke, and it was that he liked
to hear in other writers. As a contrasting example—as what he
himself liked—Kafka quoted a passage from Hoffmannsthal,
“the smell of damp flags in a hall.” And he kept silent for a
long while, said no more, as if this hidden, improbable thing
must speak for itself. This made so deep an impression on me
that I remember to this day the street and the house in front
of which this conversation took place. There may be a num¬
ber of people who manage to find in Kafka’s work an affinity
with writers like Poe, Kubin, and Baudelaire, writers of the
“night side of life,” who will be astonished to hear that it was
just to simplicity and naturalness of feeling that my friend
1 He had just as little for Wedekind and Oscar Wilde—but he loved
Thomas Mann’s Tonio Kroger, and reverently searched out every line
of this author’s in the Neue Rundschau; he read Hamsun, Hesse, Flau¬
bert, and Kassner with enthusiasm. Among favorite authors of his later
years I can name Emil Strauss, Wilhelm Schafer, Carossa (in saying this
I have no wish to express approval of their development after Kafka’s
death), also Hebei’s “Little Treasury,” Fontane, Gogol, Stifter—and
above all, constantly, Goethe and the Bible. Other authors of Kafka’s
preference are to be found in the appropriate passages in this biog¬
raphy.
44
 guided me, and led me gradually out of my confused and
corrupt state of mind, puffed up with childish pride and a
completely false assumption of a blase air. But that is how it
was. Indisputable documentary evidence is the letter I quote
below, I think the first Kafka ever wrote me. I can’t give its
exact date, because its envelope is missing, but it must be
before 1906 (the year Kafka took his degree) because he
mentions going to lectures still.1
It gives you some idea of Kafka’s gracious character, ready
to understand other people’s views, tolerant, for all his se¬
verity about his own life, if you read how gently the letter
puts me in my place, how he localizes the attitude he re¬
proves—one of cheap romanticism and gross seeking after
effect—which he describes as a “Wolves’ Glen”—not in myself
but in the people who surrounded me at that time, and who
recognized a ringleader in me.

Dear Max
Particularly because I was not at lectures yesterday, I feel
it is important to write to you to explain why I didn’t come
with you to the evening at the Redout, although I did per¬
haps promise to do so.
Forgive me, I wanted to give myself the pleasure of bring¬
ing you and Pr. together for one evening, because I thought
there was bound to be some lovely combinations when you,
carried away by the impulse of the moment, made hyper-
sarcastic remarks—you do that when you are in company—
and he on the other hand, with the sensible grasp he has
1 The handwriting, too, points to the letter being from the earliest
period of our acquaintance, it is written in Gothic characters—later
Kafka used Latin characters. His handwriting went through various
stages of development in the course of years. The Gothic flourishes in
the beginning accord with the rich, rounded-off, decorated, occa¬
sionally precious, style of his prose. In accordance with this, the letters
to Oskar Poliak, written in a still earlier period are written in a still
more ornamental handwriting. The period of his spacious Latin hand¬
writing is the period of comparatively peaceful maturity and mastery.
Manuscripts from the last few years often reveal the use of a fine pen,
tiny characters, speed, as though overwhelmed by the richness of his
inspiration.
45
of almost every point except art, would give you the right
answer.
But when I first thought of it, I forgot your crowd, the
little crowd with whom you go around. To the first glance of
a stranger it doesn’t show you up to advantage. Because it is
partly dependent on you, and partly independent. In so far
as it is dependent, it stands around like a receptive mountain
range with a ready echo. That puts the listener off. While his
eyes would like to busy themselves peacefully with the ob¬
ject in front of him, he is attacked from the rear. In this case
he cannot but lose his ability to enjoy either, especially if he
doesn’t happen to be more than usually agile.
In so far as your companions are independent, they do
you still more harm, because they caricature you. Through
them you are not seen in your proper perspective; as far as
the listener is concerned, you are defeated through yourself,
and the wonderful moment when your friends are consist¬
ent does not help; friendly crowds are only useful in revo¬
lution when they all play their parts simultaneously and
simply, but when there is a small uprising by a straggling
light at a table, they ruin it. This is what happens when you
want to show your conversation piece “Landscape at Dawn”
and put it up as the backcloth—but your friends think the
“Wolves’ Glen” would be more suitable, and they set your
“Wolves’ Glen” up in the wings. Of coruse you painted both
pictures, and every onlooker can recognize that, but what
disturbing shadows there are on the meadows of a “Land¬
scape at Dawn” and foul birds fly over the field. That’s what
I think about it. It doesn’t happen to you very often, but it
does happen from time to time (and I still don’t quite under¬
stand this) that you say, “Look at Flaubert! There you have
nothing but discussions about facts, you see, there is no senti¬
mental nonsense.” How odious I could make you appear if I
used it in this way some time or other. You say, “How beauti¬
ful Werther is!” I say, “But if we are prepared to tell the truth,
there is a lot of sentimental nonsense in it after all.” That is a
ridiculous, unpleasant remark, but I am your friend when I
say it, I don’t wish to do you any harm, I only want to tell the
46
listener your whole opinion on such matters. For it may often
be a sign of friendship not to take a friend’s pronouncements
too seriously any more. But meanwhile the listener has be¬
come sad and tired.
I have written this because it would be still sadder if you
didn’t forgive me for not having spent the evening with you
than if you don’t forgive me for this letter; my love to you,
Your Franz K.
Don’t put it away yet, I have read it through once more
and see it is not clear. I wanted to write: What a wonderful
stroke of luck for you that you can safely venture to grow
careless when you are feeling tired, and yet be led to a point
you are striving to reach without taking a step yourself,
through the help of a friend who absolutely shares your
thoughts; that is just the thing, when it is made a display
of—that was what I thought to myself at Pr.’s—that shows you
as I don’t want you to be. That’s enough of that now.

Absolute truthfulness was one of the most important and

distinctive features of his character. Another distinguish¬
ing feature was his unimaginably precise conscientiousness.
Conscientia scrupulosa. It revealed itself in all questions of
a moral nature, where he could never overlook the slightest
shadow of any injustice that occurred. From the very begin¬
ning one is reminded of debates in the Talmud; this method
of reasoning was foreshadowed there too; at the same time,
he didn’t get to know the Talmud itself until much later on in
life. Many of his works exhibit this trait, for example, “The
Runners-by,” in which the possibilities are discussed which
could have led to one man’s running behind another man in
the night, but not running after him—or the great scene in
The Trial, in which the legend “Before the Law” is discussed
from various angles.
There were times when Franz himself could not get over
tiny scruples, was afraid he had done this, that, or the other
wrong, and admired, e contrario, every decision, particularly
decisions concerning marriage, to an exaggerated degree. At
the same time, as far as his own person was concerned, he
47
 was brave, a good horseman, swimmer, and oarsman. His
conscientiousness therefore arose from no cowardice, but
from an unusually developed sense of responsibility. I re¬
member going out for the evening with him once immedi¬
ately after the news that Italy had declared war on Turkey
(Tripoli) had been published. We were in the theater.
Franz was unusually restless. During the interval he sud¬
denly said, “Now the Italian battleships are taking up posi¬
tion before the undefended coasts.” And the sad smile with
which he said it! The condition of contemporary humanity
seemed to him hopeless and desperate. And yet for all his
deep pessimism one must not overlook his joy in everything
that was healthy and growing, his interest in every kind of
reform—e.g. in the methods of natural healing, in modem
methods of education, such as the Montessori system. In the
authors of the “night side,” of the decadence, he felt as we
have already said, not the slightest interest. It was to the
simple positive forms of life that he was powerfully attracted.
Among his favorite books were Stifter’s “Indian Summer” and
Hebei’s “Little Treasury.” In him there was a rare mixture of
hopelessness and constructive urge which in his case did
not cancel each other out but rose to endlessly complicated
visions.
The artistic counterpart of the preciseness of his conscien¬
tiousness is the attention he gives to detail in his descriptions.
You can see it in every one of his books. He loved detail. Un¬
der his influence I wrote a long descriptive novel which went
into every detail, called “The Thousand Pleasures”—Franz
and I sometimes called it also “The Happy Ones.” Franz used
to be enormously pleased every time I read him a new chap¬
ter I had finished, and urged me to go on with it (1909). I fin¬
ished the book, but I never published more than one chapter
of it, in a magazine, “Under the Intoxication of Books,” a de¬
scription of the university library—because in the end, despite
lively protests from Kafka, the whole thing seemed to me too
monstrous. Kafka’s preference for thoroughness, for descrip¬
tions that ranged far and wide, was characteristically dis¬
played in his life too. He was often late for appointments; not
48
out of unpunctuality, but because he had felt the need to
settle some other business absolutely exactly before leaving
it. There was nothing that was unimportant, nothing that he
would just “leave at that.” He could no more be unjust to a
thing or an everyday piece of work than he could to a human
being. That was why when one was with him one had the im¬
pression strongly that nothing vulgar or “common” existed at
all. Saints and founders of religions are said to have affected
people similarly—and going about with Kafka has convinced
me that such reports are based on real experience. The cate¬
gory of sacredness (and not really that of literature), is the
only right category under which Kafka’s life and work can be
viewed. By this I do not wish to suggest that he was a perfect
saint—that would be, even in his own sense, a thoroughly
false, not to say iniquitous statement. But from the many in¬
dications, even taking all the proper caution that every step
on this the last crest of human nature demands even from the
observer himself, one may pose the thesis that Franz Kafka
was on the road to becoming one. The explanation of his
charming shyness and reserve, which seemed nothing less
than supernatural—and yet so natural—and of his dismay¬
ingly severe self-criticism, lies in the fact that he measured
himself by no ordinary standard, but simply measured him¬
self up against the ultimate goal of human existence. Here,
too, we can find one of the motives that held him back from
publishing his works.
A characteristic that places him in the realm of the sacred
was his absolute faith. He believed in a world of Rightness,
he believed in “The Indestructible” of which so many of his
aphorisms speak. We are too weak always to recognize this
real world. But it is there. Truth is visible everywhere. It
glints through the mesh of what we call “reality.” This ex¬
plains Kafka’s deep interest in every detail, every wrinkle of
this reality. In the diary there are to be found pages and
pages of notes on the appearance, features, etc., of indifferent
people, people sitting opposite him in the train, for instance.
Immediately bound up with this interest is a pervading irony.
Even the most gruesome episodes in Kafka’s writings (In
49
the Penal Colony, “The Whipper”—chapter v of The Trial)
stand in a curious twilight of humor, an investigator’s interest
and tender irony. This humor, which is an essential ingredi¬
ent of Kafka’s writing (and of his manner of living), points
through the meshes of reality to the divine existence beyond.
His faith in this existence, never expressed in formulas, and
never in a clumsy appeal to emotion, expressed itself in all his
actions, made him at heart inwardly certain of himself, al¬
though he was fond of presenting himself and others with a
picture of the uttermost uncertainty, made him above all
spread around himself a sweet aura of certainty such as I
have only very rarely felt elsewhere.
In everything he came into contact with Kafka looked for
that which was important, that which came from this world
of truth. That is why he was the best of listeners, the best of
questioners, the best of readers and critics. How remote from
his way of looking at things was all the talk about the “stand¬
ards,” “literary hallmarks,” “distinction of rank.” In every
case he hit upon the essential. He could be carried away by a
turn of speech in a newspaper article; with passionate en¬
thusiasm he would dilate on the crowded life, the eye for
drama, in some novel by some author or other who was gen¬
erally sneered at as “cheap.” I remember how, that time we
were staying together in Schelesen in the Stiidl boarding¬
house, he produced a novel by Ohnet from the boarding¬
house library and, with great enthusiasm, read me a
passage—a conversation—which he praised for its unforced
liveliness. Odd passages in a musical comedy or a conven¬
tional film that had somehow come off and taken on organic
shape as if by a miracle (the Muse had thrust the wretched
author’s pen on one side, and written a few lines herself)
could move him to tears. He was an entirely independent ex¬
plorer, who had not the faintest idea of being tied down by
the insensitive classifications of histories of literature.
He passed judgment on people and conditions in exactly
the same way. He had neither a prejudice in favor of going
with conventional opinion, nor a prejudice in favor of going
against it on principle. The most refreshing thing about him
50
was that he was completely unparadoxical—in fact anti-para-
doxical. His judgment had a certain elemental simplicity,
naturalness, obviousness. It was easy and sure, although he
delivered it with great care and was extremely, even pas¬
sionately, ready to acknowledge a mistake.
In people, too, who were considered contemptible by the
world in general, he saw admirable single qualities. He never
lost patience, one might say, with any man. And in great men,
whom he himself admired, he found ridiculous features. But
when he emphasized comic details of this kind, there was
never any suggestion of holding them up to derision in it, but
rather a quiet tear and regret, or acknowledgment of some¬
thing incomprehensible which passes our earthly under¬
standing. The love he felt for Goethe and Flaubert never
changed in all the two-and-twenty years I was a close friend
of his. In the case of some writers, such as Hebbel and Grill-
parzer, Kafka liked their diaries better than their works—or
so it seemed to me, at least. I have never heard him pass dis¬
respectful remarks against the great, never heard him use the
method of bluff which is so popular nowadays, and which
consists in an impertinent and effectively delivered sneering
reference to a writer’s “youthful period” and his “puerilia.”
In this respect one may well say that Kafka had a very clear
idea of the difference in rank there is among people. Only
he also knew how easily the divine—and also the devilish-
sparks overleap these classifications according to rank. And
since he was too conscientious ever to simplify the picture of
the world for himself, he watched this “overleaping” with a
zeal for knowledge which one can only describe as fanatical.
His preciseness did not come from any cowardice which
had to hide behind ideas, and was also not pedantic like
Zola’s preciseness. It was a quite special preciseness of gen¬
ius, the peculiarity of which at first dumbfounded one, strik¬
ing as it did a road which had previously lain hidden and
which one had least expected, and then following this road
with astonishing consistency right to the end—but in such a
manner that one admitted that it was not capriciousness, it
was a road of natural importance. Every chapter in The Trial,
51
in the other two novels The Castle and Amerika, and in the
unfinished short stories demonstrates this astounding peculi¬
arity of Kafka’s plastic gift.
He never pointed the way out to you by saying: “Look,
that is the right road”—or even by saying as much as, “That
is a road, too.” He simply marched on with firm step, realisti¬
cally, without using philosophical terms (for his thinking, as
his wonderful diary shows, was generally done in the form of
images), absorbed only in observing the detail which the
ever-changing vistas of the road crowded in on him.
The strangeness of Kafka’s person and writing is only ap¬
parent. In fact, one should add, anyone who finds Kafka
singular and attractive on account of his bizarrerie has not
yet understood him, or perhaps may be in the first stages of
understanding him. Kafka traced to their source the indi¬
vidual and the unobvious with such love and preciseness that
things came to light which one had never before suspected,
which seem strange indeed and yet are nothing but true.
Such, too, was his way of looking at a moral duty, a fact of
life, a journey, a work of art, a political movement—never
bizarre, but only very exact, keen, right, and in consequence
different from everyday talk, in consequence, perhaps, also
quite often (though not perhaps always) unsuitable for what
one calls “practical life.”
There is no more pregnant contrast to Kafka than Balzac’s
sham preciseness, Balzac’s superlatives and generalizations
(something after this style: “She walked along with that
light tread with which every Paris woman walks between ten
and ten-fifteen in the morning”).
It is superfluous to point out (superfluous that is for any¬
one who has even half followed the above) that Kafka found
much to admire in Balzac. For he never lost the grand line in
the mass of details nor the sweep of a way of life. Kafka once
said: “Balzac carried a stick with the motto, 1 break every
obstacle’—my motto would rather be, ‘Every obstacle breaks
»
9
me.
This would be the right place to drag in a long list of re¬
marks on Kafka’s weaknesses which, however, on the whole,
52
spring in the most tragic fashion from his good qualities. By
discussing the one feature of his character “preciseness,” I
have indicated only one side of his being. One could go on
explaining and explaining (people will undoubtedly do so),
but necessarily without coming to an end. It is like walking
forever along a wall without a door—one can never penetrate
the inside of the building. But even this endless and vain ex¬
plaining does give some kind of picture of Kafka’s personal-
ity, gives a picture at the same time of its force, its weight, its
inexhaustibility. This is the same method, by the way, in
which Kafka portrays his characters, without ever explaining
them to the end.
Of course I can now no longer sort out exactly how my
opinion of Kafka developed and was perfected in the course
of the years—what was there from the very beginning and
how gradually it grew. I know only this; in the beginning our
relations developed very slowly, and it took some years be¬
fore we became really intimate.
It began with a decision we made not to let the Greek we
had picked up in our secondary schools get too rusty. To¬
gether we read Plato’s Protagoras with the aid of translations
and our school dictionary—often with a great deal of diffi¬
culty. At that time I never got as far as the real mean¬
ing which Plato was to have for me much later—long after
Kafka’s death; what we enjoyed chiefly was undoubtedly
nothing more than the vivid and scurrilous description of the
life of the Sophists, and the Plato-Socratic irony. If the read¬
ing of Plato was due to my inspiration (for I have been drawn
to this great star at various periods in my life), it was Kafka
who, to my gratitude, brought Flaubert to my attention. This
great love I inherited from him. We read A Sentimental Edu¬
cation and the Temptation of St. Anthony in the original. As
we could find time for these studies only two or three times
a week, we went on together with this work for years, and it
provided us with continual fresh material for a long time.
Our reading parties generally took place in Kafka’s little
room in his parents’ house (in Zeltner street) and sometimes
at my place. Over Kafka’s desk there hung a copy of the pic-
53
ture by Hans Thoma, “The Ploughmen.” On the wall at the
side there was a yellowing plaster cast of a little antique re¬
lief, a maenad brandishing a piece of meat—a leg of beef, to
be precise. The graceful folds of her dress danced around the
figure, which had no head. All that I still see before me just
as my eyes swept over it countless times. I have described it
in my novel The Kingdom of Love, in which Kafka appears
as Richard Garta, together with the simple, almost miserly
furnishings of the room which were of an almost provisory
nature. “The whole not uninhabitable, but not perhaps com¬
fortable for people who want the conventional ornaments
and luxury.” This modest furniture accompanied Franz to all
his lodgings in Prague: a bed, a wardrobe, the little, old,
dark brown, almost black, desk, with a few books and a lot of
unarranged notebooks. His last room (in Niklas street) had
at least a second entrance which Kafka generally used,
through the kitchen and the bathroom. Otherwise he didn’t
live apart from the rest of the family, which was certainly not
healthy for the conflicts that were ever inwardly consuming
him. In later years he tried to get away from the spell of not
being independent by taking a room of his own in a different
district. (Proust lived in the room of his childhood until he
died.)
The above-mentioned picture by Thoma, a Runstwart
print, bears witness to the great influence that a friend from
his secondary schooldays, Oskar Poliak, had on Kafka at the
time when I first got to know him. Poliak had gone deeply
into the theories of the Runstwart series of handbooks, which
were edited by Avenarius, and out of which later the Differ
League grew. At the university Poliak began by reading
chemistry; that Kafka, too, began with fourteen days of
chemistry happened most probably for the sake of Poliak,
whose special gifts of leadership are hinted at also in Franz’s
letters to him. Poliak afterwards went to Vienna and Rome
as a historian of art; baroque and modern art, the architec¬
tural history of Prague and Rome were his chief fields of ac¬
tivity and he furthered them by important work of extraordi¬
nary scientific import, founded on meticulous studies of
54
sources. The young professor fell on the Isonzo front as a
volunteer in the Austrian army in 1915. Among the riches of
his posthumous papers was found, ready for print, the manu¬
script of a two-volume work on “Art Activities under Pope
Urban VII,” which has since been published, as well as drafts
of manuscripts on the papacies of Innocent II and Alexan¬
der VII, preliminary notes for a bibliography of the guide¬
books of Rome, and the beginnings of a collection of material
for a monograph on Pietro da Cortona, and other fragments.
One of the wild ironies of war—the scholar who had devoted
most of his life to the love of Italian art, must needs have his
life ended by Italian bullets! In the Neue Zuricher Zeitung
of August 27,1915, J. A. F. Orbaan, of Geneva, paid honor to
the man who died “crowned with the halo of science.” After
praising several essays of his, e.g. the keenly critical tone of
his “Architects’ Fairy Stories,” he goes on: “It is no wonder
that we so tensely awaited the publication of the ‘Sources of
Baroque,’ which he had planned in the grand manner, and
the first volume of which, dealing with a section of the art
life of Rome, he had reserved for himself, and which was to
be followed in a reasonably short while by a critical edition
of Baglione’s Careers of Artists. We knew that our excellent
colleague was, in the first place, on intimate terms with the
actual works of art, through his many wanderings in Rome
and about it, an advantage which not all art historians pos¬
sess, because the libraries and the archives often claim all
their strength. We knew it from our daily meetings with him
when we saw his kindly, tanned face in the Vatican early in
the morning, after he had the previous day collected together
in out-of-the-way parts of Latium a rich booty of notes and
negatives of the country seats and churches of the Barberini.
With the same spirit of enterprise he would then sit down to
a pile of books of the managing board of the Fabbrica di San
Pietro, the Barberini library, the Papal Treasury, or of rare
books of the seicento, completely at home with the bookkeep¬
ing of antiquity and able to decipher the cacography and
technical language of master-builders and master-painters
since passed away. A learned conversation with the
55
 ever-interested Poliak on the remote theme of the paleogra¬
phy of baroque was always worth while. He achieved as¬
tonishing results in the interpretation of entries written al¬
most in shorthand, which you find here and there in some
firm’s books, where important information about Giovanni
Lorenzo Bernini may be waiting round the comer at any mo¬
ment. But with all this work, which demanded a severe daily
dose of research into manuscript sources and other literature
of the same kind, Poliak never had anything about him of the
superfluous, and always awkward, self-importance of the
savant. He was in deadly earnest, and he brought every
ounce of effort and brain-power to bear on his work, but his
studies did not make him any the less capable of enjoying
the pleasures and excitement of the moment and these were
offered him in plenty by his marriage with a witty and affec¬
tionate young wife, who showed a fine understanding for
what he was striving to do, and by the time he spent in the
company of a wide circle of friends and acquaintances in¬
cluding people of the country.”
This, then, was the man who won a decisive influence over
Kafka in his younger days. To complete the picture I shall
quote from an obituary by Hugo Bergmann (Bohemia, July
4,1915). “The richness of his interests was inexhaustible; but
to whatever it might be that got hold of him and carried him
away at one time or another, he devoted himself completely,
forgot everything else for its sake, and in no time became a
disciple and a gospeler. In this way he studied the Upani-
shad, the Bible, Luther, St. Francis of Assisi, the Italian short
story tellers of the Renaissance—with what purity he could
read the Decameron to us—in this way he took up playing
the guitar, and sport of various kinds.” I hear he was one of
the first to take up skiing in Bohemia.
I myself remember Oskar Poliak as a young man who
passed severe judgments and knew his own mind. Despite
his nineteen years he wore a full beard. This, I now discover
after my researches, he later discarded together with a cer¬
tain abruptness and stand-offishness of manner, which at that
time made any approach to him no easy matter. Him, too I
56
 met in the “Hall.” On that occasion he recommended to me
the “Rembrandt-German.” The most serious Jewish intellec-
tualism, unconscious of its origin, revealed facets, at that
time, which had many analogies with, and tried to take les-
/ sons from, a Teutonism that was groping into the past for its
pure wells of strength. So far as I know, Oskar Poliak never
bothered himself with truly Jewish questions, and it was not
until very much later that Kafka and I came to this our home
ground. The love of Teutonism led, in all honesty, and so to
speak, innocence of heart, occasionally also to pure Teuto-
mania. For example, in one of Kafka’s letters to Oskar Poliak
you may find the following passage, which sounds odd to the
ear of a connoisseur of Kafka’s later style:
“Just opposite the vineyard, on the road, deep in the valley,
stands a tiny cottage, the first and the last in the village.
There isn’t much in it. Between you and me it’s worth at the
outside a miserable hundred shillings. And what is still worse
not even Schultze-Naumburg could find a use for it, unless,
at most, as a hideous warning. In all probability I and the
owner are the only people who love it and weave our dreams
about it. It is small and squat. It isn’t even old. On the con¬
trary, it’s a modest five or ten years old at most. It has a tiled
roof, a tiny door, through which one can obviously only
crawl, and a window on either side. Everything is symmetri¬
cal, as though it had crept out of a school textbook. But—the
door is of heavy wood, painted brown, the shutters are
painted brown, and always shut, in sunshine or in rain. And
yet the house is inhabited, too. And in front of the door is a
broad, heavy, stone bench, which appears to be almost old.
And when one day three apprentices come along with their
sticks in their hands and their all-too-light knapsacks on their
backs, and sit down on it to rest, and wipe the sweat from
their brows, and then lean their heads together—I can see all
this quite well from up above—then it is like a dear, old,
peaceful German fairy story.”
The influence of the works of art and art values which
Kunstwart propagated is here clearly revealed in every de¬
tail. When it concerns a writer who, like Kafka, so early de-
57
veloped his own quite personal attitude in which scarcely a
trace of outside influence can any longer be felt, to know of
this beginner’s stage of dependence strikes one as nothing
less than grotesque, and, at the same time, touching, it seems
tome.
The letters to Oskar Poliak are from the years 1902 till
1904. In this case Kafka wooed the friendship; in his friend¬
ship with me, which broke up this first strong spiritual tie,
things were rather the other way round. At least, Kafka was
the stronger partner in our friendship, if through nothing else
than his calm and reserve, even though a foundation of
equality of rights was cheerfully acknowledged on either
side. It is with astonishment that I learn from Kafka’s youthful
letters to Poliak that he himself offered to send him his writ¬
ings, or to read them to him. That never happened later—one
had to plead hard with Kafka, and bring fervent pressure to
bear on him before one could get him to show one anything
in his manuscripts. This attitude was not, all the same,
founded on pride, but on immoderate self-criticism. It began
very early with him. Thus the fifth letter to Poliak is followed
by an unpublished one, from which I quote, with the addi¬
tional inducement that it tells us something about these first
works of Kafka’s which have not survived: “Of the few thou¬
sand lines I am giving you there might be perhaps ten that
I could listen to patiently, the flourish of trumpets in my pre¬
vious letter was unnecessary, instead of a revelation emerges
childish scribbling. . . . The greatest part of it, I openly
say, I find repulsive. ‘Morning,’ for example, and other bits,
too—I find it impossible to read it all, and I am satisfied if you
can stand odd samples. But you must remember I began at a
time when one ‘created work,’ when one wrote high-flown
stuff; there is no worse time to begin. And I was so mad
about grand phrases. Among my papers there is a sheet on
which are written all the uncommon and particularly im¬
pressive names I could find in the calendar. You see I needed
two names for a novel, and chose finally two, underlined,
Johannes and Beate—Renate had already been snatched
58
from under my nose x—because of the size of their halo. It is
almost funny.”
In this letter there are some mischievous remarks about
another schoolfellow, who had an inexhaustible store of
words—“they were bars of iron, and I was driven to despair
when I saw how easily he threw them around. There was no
hope of my approaching it, and I vowed never again in all
my life to be so jealous as I was then.” This is followed by
even severer self-criticism. “There is one thing that is en¬
tirely missing in these copy-books, that is hard work, perse¬
verance, and whatever all these strange things are called.”
In the next paragraph he writes again, “What I lack is disci¬
pline. That you half read the copy-books is the least I want
from you today. You have a lovely room. The little lights
from the shops below twinkle, tucked away, and busily. I
want you to let me read to you there every Saturday, begin¬
ning from the very next Saturday ever, for half an hour.
I am going to work hard for three months. Above all, I know
this now: Art needs hard work more than hard work needs
art. Of course I don’t believe that one can force oneself to
give birth, but one can force oneself to look after the chil¬
dren.”
I don’t know how Oskar Poliak received the works of
Kafka which were submitted to his severe judgment, whether
he admired him as I did from the very start; to be hon¬
est, as I felt I had to admire him. Oskar Poliak’s interests
certainly lay in rather a different direction from Kafka’s
fantastic microcosm, which, particularly at that period, had
a specially whimsical air—it was just the extraordinariness,
the unrepeatable newness of it that pleased me. The first
friend of his youth, who left Prague very soon afterwards,
was drawn to great things, to the laws of science. So Kafka’s
cry of longing fell at first on deaf ears—the cry that rings so
movingly through the letters and thus early anticipates the
later longing for community: “You will never do anything
without other men”; “To become a hermit is abhorrent”;
and the polemic, which affects one, one can only say like
1 Allusion to an early work of Wassermann’s.
59
prophecy, against “the Mole,” which became a symbol in
Kafka’s late period. “I know that were a pair of stranger’s
eyes to look at it, they would make everything warmer and
more alive”—for me that is the vital sentence of the young
Kafka in tnis pursuit, in this friendship about which I first
learned from a study of the letters, and to which, remarkably
enough, Franz himself hardly ever made a definite allusion
in my hearing. Perhaps it never got further than a trial friend¬
ship, and no real relationship ever came out of it; Kafka’s
later silence—there is no mention of it in the diary—would
seem to me to point to this. But that does not in the least
affect the greatness of the molding influence his first comrade
had on him. He disappeared from our sight, first to take up a
job as a tutor in the country, and then to his famous scientific
work in Rome. From time to time we used to hear how he
would show and explain the architectural monuments of
Rome to friends, visitors to Rome from our circle, in a par¬
ticularly kindly way, with no trace of gruffness any longer,
and of course extraordinarily knowledgeably. Then the
dreadful news of his death at far too early an age shocked us.
I went about with Kafka for several years without knowing
that he wrote. I myself had already published several things
in newspapers and magazines, and my first book appeared in
1906. Perhaps the first mention that my friend made to me of
his literary activities was when he told me he had sent in a
short story for a competition in the Vienna newspaper Zeit.
He sent it in under the pseudonym “Heaven in Narrow
Streets.” That may possibly have been the title of the story as
well, I can’t remember exactly any longer. The entry did not
gain a mention in the competition, and has disappeared.
Then one day, in 1909, he read me the beginning of a novel
which was called “Preparations for a Wedding in the Coun¬
try.” Parts of the manuscript survive in unpublished form. The
hero’s name was Raban. Here, too, is a reference to the “ego,”
through the philological similarity of the two names Kafka
and Raban,1 like that which Franz himself analyzed in the
1 Kafka, remember, means jackdaw, while Raban is similar to the
German Rabe=raven. Note, too, the two as in Kafka and Raban.
60
name of the hero of his short story “The Verdict,” which is
Bendemann. Raban, as the first chapter tells us, leaves his
workshop to go and see his fiancee who lives in the country.
The first chapter describes, with great detail, in the twilight
of humor, no more than the journey to the station, a rainy
afternoon, and a few meetings with casual acquaintances. It
is extraordinary. I was overpowered and delighted.1
I got the impression immediately that here was no ordinary
talent speaking, but a genius. My efforts to bring Kafka’s
works before the public began from that moment—an en¬
deavor that was stronger than myself, and which indeed I
made no effort to fight against, because I considered it right
and natural. Franz resisted sometimes with greater, some¬
times with less violence, sometimes not at all: one cannot say
that he always on principle adopted an attitude of disap¬
proval (after all, apart from other things, his entering in the
competition I mentioned above shows this). Naturally he,
too, sometimes felt pleased over literary success. There was,
I must admit, generally a deprecatory smile there at the same
time; but once I saw him very angry at an unfavorable un¬
understanding criticism in the “Almanack” of the Diirer
League. In general his hopes and fears were directed towards
quite other things than literary reputation, which was not ex¬
actly unpleasant to him, but unimportant. The whole busi¬
ness of publicity didn’t interest him very much, did not oc¬
cupy his feelings very much—so that his shrinking from
publication (apart from certain later periods in his life) was
a matter of no great fuss, no passion.
I mentioned his works, which had not yet been published
at all, in the Berlin weekly Die Gegenwart, by adding his
1 The impression this made on me was increased, if that were pos¬
sible, when he read me his short story, “Description of a Battle.”
(The date of this in my diary is March 14, 1910.) The draft of this
work, which Franz did not value very highly—in fact on March 18,
1910 he wrote to me, “Dear Max, the thing that pleases me most about
the short story is that I have, got rid of it”—and the manuscript of which
I took home with me, because he wanted to destroy it, dates back several
years I am sure, and points distinctly to the period of family dances, to
the time he was at the university. On studying my diary closer, I dis¬
cover that this was not the first of his works that Kafka showed me.
61
name to a list I gave of prominent authors (Blei, Mann,
Wedekind, and Meyrink). This must have been the first
public reference to Kafka’s name (February 9, 1907). Kafka
wrote me a letter full of humor about this “carnival-like first
appearance before the public. I was certainly displaying a
certain amount of high spirits in thus offering to the public
the name of a writer a single line of whose had not been
printed at the time, in the same breath with very big names,
as though everyone should have heard of him. A little joke,
of no importance. “Very well, so I have had one dance this
winter after all,” Franz mocked.
It was not until 1909 that some of Kafka’s prose works were
printed for the first time, in Franz Blei’s journal, Hyperion.
(Blei had come out very warmly in favor of my first book,
“Death to the Dead,” and afterwards often came to Prague,
and I introduced him to Kafka.) The second published work
was “The Aeroplanes at Brescia” (September 28,1909) which
appeared in the Prague daily, Bohemia. The third was pub¬
lished in the Easter supplement to Bohemia on March 27,
1910. In it, under the general title of “Contemplations,” will
be found the following works: “At the Window,” “At Night,”
“Clothes,” “The Passenger,” “Thoughts for Gentlemen Rid¬
ers.” Nobody took any notice of these writings which it cost
me so much energy to get published. (In book form, entitled
“Contemplation” [in the singular], these pieces are called
“Distracted Gazing,” “The Runners-by,” and then as above,
“Clothes,” “The Passenger” and “Thoughts for Gentlemen
Riders.” Franz Blei had published two passages from the
story “Description of a Battle.”
In 1908 Max Bauml, the friend of my childhood, died.
From then on my relations with Franz grew deeper. We
met daily, sometimes even twice a day. The whole time
Franz was in Prague (it was only later that his illness forced
him to live in the country, in sanatoriums), we kept up this
custom. When we had both achieved the longed-for post
“with a single shift” (i.e. with no afternoon duty), as chance
would have it, we both went the same way home from our
offices. So I used to wait for Franz every day at two o’clock
62
in the afternoon by the “Powder Tower”—how well and
thoroughly I studied the beautifully wrought, old double¬
headed imperial eagle on the gable of the provincial head
office of the internal revenue, on the corner of Hyberner
lane, because Franz was always later than I—he had some¬
thing extra to do in the office, or got lost in conversation with
his colleagues—with my stomach rumbling, I used to stride
up and down; but my anger was quickly forgotten, when the
slim, tall figure of my friend hove in sight, generally with an
embarrassed smile that was intended rather to simulate than
really to express utter fright, nay horror, at being so fright¬
fully late. At the same time he would hold his hand clasped
to his heart. This gesture meant, “I am innocent.” What is
more, he came along at the run, so that one really couldn’t say
anything very furious to him. As we walked along together
the same way from Zeltner street to the Old Town Square,
there was always no end of things we had to tell each other,
and when we did reach Franz’s house, it was still a long time
before we could finish talking. And in the afternoon or eve¬
ning we were together again.
In my novel The Kingdom of Love, in the figure of Richard
Garta I have set down very much of what remains of Kafka
in my heart and memory. Write an objective biography of
Kafka!—that I felt I could not do at that time, four years
after his death. It is only now, after nine more years have
passed, thirteen years, that is, after the catastrophe, that I can
bring myself to do it. At that time, however, I lived still with
my unforgettable friend, he was present with me in the truest
sense of the word, always by my side, I knew exactly what he
would have said in this or that situation, exactly how he
would have thought about things that went on round about
me. I asked him questions, and could answer myself in his
name. That is how I came to feel the necessity of bringing
my incomparable friend to life in the form of a living work
of art, not in a historical study collecting dates and carefully
piecing facts together', but as an epic figure. Above all, I
wanted to bring him to life for myself in this new way. So
long as I lived in this book, in working at it, he was not dead,
63
he still lived with me and still exerted his influence on my life.
(You will find that the whole treatment of the novel serves
this purpose.) But this was misunderstood just as everything
else is—people found it odd, or even incompatible with my
reverence for Kafka. Nobody remembered that Plato in a
similar, although of course much more comprehensive way,
defied Death and all his life long kept his friend and mentor
Socrates alive and functioning still, as a companion who
lived and thought together with him, by making him the pro¬
tagonist of almost every dialogue he wrote after Socrates’
death.
Here I shall take out of this novel (for otherwise I should
have to repeat myself) the passage about the first books to
which Kafka drew my attention. Apart from Flaubert, whom
I have already mentioned, there were also Stefan George,
two volumes of whose work Kafka gave me, one on each of
two birthdays, the marvelous prose translation of Chinese
lyrics by Heilmann, not to be mentioned in the same breath
with later imitations in rhyme and watered-down versions by
other authors, and further, Robert Walser. On the unobtru¬
sive way Kafka had of making his friend (who is called
Christof in the novel) fonder of his own favorite authors, on
the whole spirit of the first years of our friendship, and on
the way it was intensified after Max Bauml’s death, I could
not find anything more apt to say than what I wrote in The
Kingdom of Love:
“Garta does not persuade one, that is not his way, and he
does not evolve a system—systems are not much in his line.
What he does is read to you over and over again this or that
passage from his favorite authors in his rapid, unemotional
voice that, at the same time, creates a sense of rhythm and
climax, with a throbbing chant in the background, with his
eyes flashing, surrendering himself utterly to joy in human
greatness; except that now and then he quietly curls his lip,
not at all mischievously, but rather in gleeful skepticism-
well, welll—when some bit seemed to him not quite to have
come off, or to be painfully exaggerated. Anything forced, in
any artistic expression, he always thrusts as far away from
64
him as possible, unless it be that as an effort it is at least
genuine, and the writer cannot avoid it, in which case it ad-,
mittedly betrays his occasional weaknesses and demands
only sympathy with what his other deeds show him capable
of. In short, he does not canvass for his chosen ones, he al¬
ways sees clearly, there is clarity even in his most unbounded
enthusiasm, he never attempts to rush Christof off his feet;
on the contrary it often comes to Christof, being the one who
is all aflame for the works that Garta revealed to him, and
who even feels he must rush to the defense on behalf of
some parts of them, against Garta. All this is done with the
pleasantest earnestness, it is a gracious mutual education on
the part of each; there is no breath of vanity or pretense;
both have the feeling that at this very moment the whole
world differentiates itself into purest truth and worthlessness.
Not only that, but this feeling does not make them proud, or
excessively worried, or crushed under responsibility. It is
quite a simple feeling—the Good is there, and it lies in our
power either to follow after it, or, which would be senseless
folly, to reject it. But who, who would do that! So they enter
joyfully into the land of ‘The Spirit' which is otherwise hid¬
den from the poor children of men by millions of reserva¬
tions, chances, sorrows, passions, considerations; but in this
case it has revealed itself for once quite simply in all the
bright, health-giving light of its eternal splendor, it lies
there—invitingly great.
“Then comes the decisive turn of events—Christofs first
friend, who passed through all the eight classes of his secon¬
dary school with him, dies. A few days after the funeral
Christof, sad unto death, goes for a walk with Richard Garta
in the evening. It is the ‘Kleinseite,’ dark castle stairways rise
above them. ‘Will you ... fill his place for me?’ he asks, stam¬
mering, knowing in the deep distress of his heart that he is
asking an impossible question—and yet feeling that there was
something justifiable, courageous, and good about the ques¬
tion, and that this was fully recognized by Garta. Only there
is no other way in which it can be recognized than by a long,
deep silence. Then they walk through many a narrow, wind-
65
ing street, side by side, still in silence, and Christof thinks he
can feel the presence of his good, loving friend who is dead,
and with whom really his whole boyhood died—the memory
of countless things they went through together at school, of
first perceptions and sorrows, narrow but deep scars in the
heart. When one is at school, friendship comes of itself, but
afterwards it must be won, fought for indeed, and finally
even this becomes impossible. That is the law of the world
of men. . . . The question, and the answer that was never
given, were never mentioned again. But from this night on
the parting handshake of the two friends is heartier and
longer.”
Reading together and exchanging our favorite authors
may have been the first thing that brought us clearly to¬
gether, but alongside this great and noble circumstance
there was from the beginning an immense number of little
circumstances, almost unnoticeable, in which we formed the
complement to one another. If I don’t wish to pretend false
modesty, I must at this point confess that Kafka felt he bene¬
fited just as much from me as I did from him. My initiative
and energy were the characteristics that especially appealed
to him in me. Looking at things objectively, I was not at all
so unreflectively bold and unconcerned as he perhaps saw
me. If I were writing my own biography now, I should know
how to explain and illustrate that in great detail. As it is, it is
enough to state that, in comparison with Kafka, it was I who
was the adventurer and that I really was. What fascinated me
about Kafka I am at liberty to explain in greater detail. He
had an unusual aura of power about him, such as I have
never met anywhere else, even when I met very important,
famous men. I have often tried to analyze this peculiarity,
after Kafka’s death that is, because while he was alive it
made itself felt in a way so naturally and so completely taken
for granted, that the idea of thinking about it never struck
one. Perhaps the best way to express this remarkable, ex¬
tremely personal characteristic is this; the unintermittent
compactness of his ideas could not endure a gap, he never
spoke a meaningless word. Everything that came from him,
66
came in a way that became less and less forced as the years
went on, a precious expression of his quite special way of
looking at things—patient, life-loving, ironically considerate
towards the follies of the world, and therefore full of sad
humor, but never forgetful of the real kernel, “The Inde¬
structible,” and so always far from being blase or cynical.
Yes, that was it—in his presence the everyday world under¬
went a transformation, everything was new, new in a way
that was often very sad, not to say shattering, but which
never precluded the possibility of final consolation because
it was never dull, and never flat. In a thousand easy ways, so
it seemed, his powers of observation caught connections, of
which one had never dreamed, but which had nothing arbi¬
trary, nothing “surrealistic,”1 or wayward about them, but
were true connections, minute but faithful perceptions, from
which one felt a strong urge to build up a completely new
system of knowledge—without failing to realize that the at¬
tempt to know the world and the souls of men in such me¬
ticulous detail is of course justified and even very essential
and yet may easily have to be reckoned among those things
which, like Kafka’s Great Wall of Chirm, or The Trial, can
never, by their very nature, come to an end.
In addition, it was not only on me, but on many others
that Kafka had the effect I have described. Among the
friends and in the hospitable house of Mrs. Bertha Franta,
where precise philosophy was discussed, with the lady of
the house taking a zealous part in the discussions, Kafka had
a very high reputation—simply by virtue of his personality,
his occasional remarks, and his conversation—because no one
at that time beyond myself knew his literary work. There
was no need of his works, the man produced his own effect
himself, and despite all the shyness of his behavior, he was
always quickly recognized by men of worth as someone out
of the ordinary. At all periods of his life women felt them¬
selves drawn to Franz—he himself doubted he had this effect,
but the fact cannot be disputed.
1 The word did not exist at that time. The surrealists of today claim
Kafka as one of themselves without foundation.
67
 How markedly a special spell pervaded every living utter¬
ance of Kafka’s, how you can except from this not a word,
not a line that he wrote—be it on a casual picture postcard,
or just wishing someone many happy returns, or dedicating
a book—appears from the following express messages and
short notes which he wrote to me. Generally they contain
only cancellations of a rendezvous, or apologies—as we saw
each other every day there was no other reason for writing
to each other, except when one of us occasionally failed to
turn up. Even for these everyday bits of information, Franz
never had a conventional, ready formula. And that is why
just these writings hastily tossed off (they deal with the
period of our studies, the law examinations and then first
work in the office) appear to me to be especially character¬
istic documents of a boundlessly rich spirit which never
succumbed to routine or convention. Here are some speci¬
mens:

1
I am now half delighted that I am actually studying at last,
and for that reason will not come to our cafe this week. I
would very much like to be there, because I never study
after 7 o’clock; but if I do take a little change of this kind, it
disturbs my studies all day the next day. And I daren’t waste
any time. So it’s better for me to read my Kiigelgen 1 in the
evening, a splendid occupation for a little mind and for
sleep when it comes. Love to you.
Franz

2
Dear Max
Now I was nearly forgetting it after all. To write and tell
you, I can’t go to the exhibition tomorrow, I can’t go at all
any more. You see I’ve let myself be led astray, and elected
to sit for my finals at a stupidly early date, while my knowl¬
edge is not even infinitesimal. Now that would be irrespon-
1 A famous book of memoirs by Wilhelm von Kiigelgen.
68
sible, and for that reason very nice, if I didn’t keep on think¬
ing of the doctor’s certificate that I shall soon have made out
for me, to enable me to withdraw. How are things with the
Amethyst? [Note— A periodical published by Franz Blei that
we subscribed to between us.] I’ve got my money prepared
already.—So take a look round at the exhibition, and see if
there isn’t anything attractive that you can buy for a small
sum. Perhaps it might do for a wedding present.
Your Franz

3
Now, dear fellow, I shan’t be able to go out anywhere for a
bit. The Dean has been so irresponsible as to fix my finals a
little earlier and as I was ashamed to be more cautious than
he, I’ve made no protest. All my love.
Franz

4
Dear Max
Forgive me for yesterday evening, please! I shall come to
your place at five o’clock. My excuse will be a little comic, so
you are quite sure to believe it.
Your Franz

My dear Max
I am a completely useless person, really, but nothing can
be done about it. Yesterday afternoon I sent you a letter by
special messenger: “Here in the tobacconist’s in the Graben
I beg you to forgive me for not being able to come tonight. I
have a headache, my teeth are falling out, my razor is blunt,
I am an unpleasant object to look at.—Your F.”
And now in the evening I go and lie down on my sofa and
reflect that I have made my excuses anyhow, and that there
is again a little order in the world, but as I am thinking it
over, I suddenly remember that I wrote Wladislaw street
[Note— Oskar Poliak’s address. I was living in Schalen street
at that time], instead of Schalen street.
69
 Now, please, I beg of you, be annoyed about it, and don’t
speak to me any more because of it. I am utterly on the
downward path, and—I can see far enough for that—I can’t
help going to the dogs. Also I should love to cut myself, but as
that is impossible, there is only one thing I can rejoice about,
and that is that I have no pity on myself, and so I have at last
become egoistic to that extent. We should celebrate achiev¬
ing this height—you and I, I mean; just as a future enemy,
you should celebrate it.
It is late. I should like you to know that I wished you a
very good night tonight.
Your Franz

6
By speedy work in the office, we have earned our lunch.
Forgive me if I don’t come today, I should have done some¬
thing on Sunday, and neglected to do it, because Sunday is
short. In the morning one sleeps, in the afternoon one washes
one’s hair, and in the evening one goes for a stroll as though
one were a lounge lizard. I always use Sunday as a spring¬
board for pleasure, which is rather ridiculous. Write and tell
me when you are free except for Thursday and Friday. All
the best.
Your Franz

7
My dear Max
We are beginning a race for unreliability and unpunctu¬
ality. Of course I don’t hope to be first in this race, because I
am only simply unpunctual through Italian industry,1 but
you through your lust for pleasure. But since you are trying
to make it up by being ready to come and see me (Wednes¬
day, I believe?) that is all right with me again. But perhaps
you are only doing it because it is easier to put off a visit than
a visitor.
Your Franz
1 He was taking Italian lessons before going on his journey to Riva.
70
 8
My Max
I am in such a bad way that I think I can only get over it
by not speaking to anyone for a week, or as long as may be
necessary. From the fact that you won’t try to answer this
postcard in any way, I shall see that you are fond of me.
Your Franz

9
My dearest Max
This, a soiled, but my most beautiful picture postcard,
is a kiss from me to you—and in front of the whole popu¬
lace! As I believe you much more than I do myself, I
thought yesterday it was really my fault, only I considered it
didn’t make so much difference, because we still have a long
time to live. But if things are as you write, and I am already
again convinced that they are, then it is all the better, and
you will soon be coming up in the lift after all. Besides, I am
in such a good mood today, as though I were beginning to
live, and your card fits in so nicely too, for what a nice friend¬
ship it must be if it begins in such a way. You don’t frighten
me at all with the date, because after all you will get your
job before then, and if not, “The Maid” 1 is coming out—it is
coming out in any case, apart from everything else, so what
more do you want, I ask you? In the night one can wish for
still more: but in the morning?

10
My dear Max
It looks as if I shall not be able to come. This morning, just
as I was looking forward to the afternoon and evening, I was
told I must go to the office in the afternoon; lunch time, as I
was looking forward to the evening only, I was told I must be
in the shop in the afternoon and the evening. There is a lot to
do, one of the assistants is ill, and father is not too well.
1 A short novel by me, “A Czech Maidservant.”
71
There would be murder if I didn’t stay in the shop till eight,
and probably there would be if I went away at night.
So forgive me nicely, please!

11

My dearest Max
Look, if I go on like this, all the people I like will be angry
with me except the one, and she doesn’t love me anyhow.
The story of my life yesterday is simple. I was there until 10
o’clock, and in the bar until 1 o’clock. At half-past seven,
when your music had already begun, I suppose, I still heard
the clock strike. My mother and my father are not feeling
well, my grandfather is ill, they are distempering the dining¬
room, and the whole family is living in my room as though it
were a gipsy caravan. This afternoon I must go to the shop.
I haven’t the courage to make my excuses to Baum. Don’t
desert me.
Your Franz

12
But your memory, dear Max! I remember so exactly. In
front of your house on Sunday night, I shook myself and said,
“Tuesday, I am going to such-and-such a place.” You said,
“Come on Wednesday.” I, “I shall be tired, and I want to go
and see Pr. . . .” “Come on Thursday then.” “All right.” So
Thursday I did come to see you. In any case I am in such a
state that even justifiable reproaches would be too much
for me.

13

My dear Max
You are lucky you are not at home; you are getting out of
several little kindnesses you might have liked to have done
for me. I am lucky, because I can all the more easily and
firmly beg you to forgive me, and to make my excuses to the
world if I can’t manage to get to Baum’s before nine o’clock.
We have some relations staying with us. What is more, on
72
Monday at five o’clock I am coming to see you for a moment.
If I am disturbing you in any work, please refuse to see me.
Your Franz

14

Dear Max
You know I have a job, so a New Year has begun, and my
worries, granted that up till now they went on foot, now fol¬
low suit and go on their hands. I should very much like to
see you at 2.30 near the statue of the Madonna in the Square,
punctually. Please, make it possible!
Your Franz K.

15

Dear Max
Written in the street, as we shall always write to each
other from now on, because the shoves you get from people
passing by gives life to the writing.
I am in front of a photograph of Paula K. Yesterday I saw
her in the flesh several times. She stood for a while, and for
a while she walked all white along Hyberner street with a
young man who was wearing unpressed trousers. Just to
get hold of something solid: her teeth are all over the place
in her mouth, on the right cheek only she has a dimple, her
complexion is fairly moldy, covered with ashes, not with
powder at all; obviously her complexion takes a rest by day.
I am coming on Thursday. Do me a favor and work hard.
Franz

If one tried to quote verbal utterances of Kafka’s, to com¬

plete these occasional written utterances in which it is just
the fact that they are occasional that lights up and makes
clear the genius that is in them, one could go on forever. But
let me quote a few examples. He was coming to see me one
afternoon—I was still living with my parents then—and his
coming in woke up my father. Instead of apologizing, he
said, in an indescribably gentle way, raising a hand as if to
calm him and walking softly on tiptoe through the room,
73
 “Please look on me as a dream.” Once he went to the Berlin
aquarium with a lady, who told me the story later with emo¬
tion. Suddenly he began to speak to the fish in their illumi¬
nated tanks, “Now at last I can look at you in peace, I don t
eat you any more.” It was the time that he turned strict vege¬
tarian. If you have never heard Kafka saying things of this
sort with his own lips, it is difficult to imagine how simply
and easily, without any affectation, without the least senti¬
mentality—which was something almost completely foreign
to him—he brought them out. Among my notes I find some¬
thing else that Kafka said about vegetarianism. He com¬
pared vegetarians with the early Christians, persecuted
everywhere, everywhere laughed at, and frequenting dirty
haunts. “What is meant by its nature for the highest and the
best, spreads among the lowly people.” In the same notes,
which I made while Kafka was still alive, I find: “Theosophy
is nothing but a surrogate for literature” (literature in our
use of the word at that time, was used in Flaubert’s sense of
the word—meant real literature). “Insurance 1 is like the re¬
ligions of primitive peoples who believe they can ward off
evil by all kinds of manipulations.” “Karl Kraus confines the
Jewish writers into his own hell, guards them well, and keeps
them under stern discipline. The only thing he forgets is that
his proper place is in the same hell with them.” He told me
that his “loveliest dream” was that he “was sitting in a boat,
and flying along an empty river-bed.” Talking about his
headaches, a frightful tension in the temples, he said, “It’s
the sort of feeling a pane of glass must have in the spot where
it cracks.” Talking about a fir tree lightly covered with snow,
when he was taking a walk with me, in Schelesen in the win¬
ter, he said, “They haven’t yet had a headache so long as I
have”; at the time his deep black hair had gone gray at the
temples. Talking about a play he had written—probably “The
Watchman of the Tomb”—when we very much wanted to
hear it, he said, “The only thing about the play that is not
dilettantish, is that I shall not read it to you.” (From Oskar
Baum’s “Memories of Franz Kafka,” in Witiko, 1929, Part 3.)
1 The reference is to Kafka’s daily work.
74
At the beginning of 1911, I made this note: On Sundays
Kafka goes for walks by himself, without any objective, with¬
out thinking. He says, “Every day I wish myself off the
earth.” ‘ There is nothing wrong with me except myself.” He
has done no work. In the afternoons he sleeps or looks at the
papers in the Arts and Crafts Museum. In company, he is
cheerful, full of humor, as a critic, unsurpassable for his
witty observations; with his conversation it is the same; it
could and should all be written down. When asked what
after all was responsible for his sad condition, and why he
couldn’t write, he said, “I have hundreds of wrong feelings—
dreadful ones—the right ones won’t come out—or if they do,
only in rags; absolutely weak.” I protest (in reply) that when
one is writing one sometimes has to work one’s way through
one’s first worthless ideas in order to come to the nobler
thoughts that lie beneath them. He answers, “That’s all right
for you, but not for me—that would mean giving these wrong
feelings the upper hand.” Here is another conversation I
noted down that I had with him on February 28, 1920. He:
“We are nihilistic thoughts that came into God’s head.” I
quoted in support the doctrine of the Gnostics concerning
the Demiurge, the evil creator of the world, the doctrine of
the world as a sin of God’s. “No,” said Kafka, “I believe we
are not such a radical relapse of God’s, only one of his bad
moods. He had a bad day.” “So there would be hope outside
our world?” He smiled, “Plenty of hope—for God—no end of
hope—only not for us.”
But it was not only when it was a question of themes of
such greatness that Kafka revealed his powerful intuitive
command of imagery, but at all times—that was just the re¬
markable thing about him. What seems peculiar to us in his
remarks was, for him, the natural and absolutely unavoid¬
able shape of life and thought. He couldn’t speak or write in
any other way than this. It was natural, it can be found again
partly even now in the way in which his sisters express them¬
selves. Quite peculiar to him were his dream-poetical and his
paradox-humoristic turns of expression. Talking of a man
who worked in the same office, he said, half in recognition,
75
half in mockery, “He doesn’t mind how long his office hours
are”—and then went on reflectively, “But one might perhaps
persuade him to.” As we were coming home once after one
of our nights of roving about, in the early hours of the morn¬
ing, and the first awakening sounds of town life were making
themselves heard—milk carts, etc.—he stopped and listened
and said, “The crickets of the metropolis.” Once when he was
taking up some of my time, and asking me to do something
for him, he said, “You forgive me for this, for I can’t forgive
myself for it.” One of his very last words has this same tinge
of paradox. When Dr. Klopstock, who was treating him, re¬
fused to give him any morphine, he said to him, “Kill me,
otherwise you are a murderer.” When he had his first attack
of blood-spitting, which heralded his tuberculosis, he ex¬
claimed—and he used these words to describe his disease as
a way out, which was even not unwelcome, from the diffi¬
culties he was then faced with on the question of the mar¬
riage he had been planning—“My head has made an appoint¬
ment with my lungs behind my back.”
However revealing the citation of details may be, it cannot
give the sum total of the effect that Kafka’s personality pro¬
duced. It was not the wit he displayed but the deep sureness
on which it was based, and the peacefulness there was in his
physical movements, that was the real thing that made itself
felt in his vicinity. I shall once again call my Garta to the
rescue and quote: “In his presence one felt directly that
what is great must prove to be as great, even when every
appearance speaks against it—that the noble kernel of the
world remains untouched by all the abuses and perversions
that exist. He didn’t say this, it is only very rarely that he
speaks about things like that, and when he does it is only
hesitatingly, in fleeting images that often sound almost like
jokes. But his whole behavior, down to the smallest detail,
even if you only watch the way he brushes his hair, is based
on the belief that there is, as a premise taken for granted
without discussion, a mode of life which is right, thorough,
clean, and unshakably natural. It is there. But to find it, to
arrive at it—that is the difficulty. Deny this enormous diffi-
76
 culty—that he is far from doing. On the contrary: he sees all
the confusion and all that is in a nasty way comic in the
world more intensively than any other man. He knows one
can’t take a step without getting into complications, without
/ stumbling. And yet there is this deep confidence that the
inner excellence will mature.”

77
 CHAPTER III

TO EARN ONE’S LIVING OR LIVE

ONE’S LIFE?

ON JULY 18, 1906, Kafka obtained his doctorate in juris¬

prudence at the Imperial and Royal Karl-Ferdinand German
University of Prague.
He did the usual so-called year in the courts, i.e. the un¬
paid practice in the law courts which those lawyers who in¬
tend to be called to the bar have to go through. Kafka never
had any intention of following a legal career—he used this
year only as a breathing space after the strain of the exami¬
nations, and also as a breathing space in which to look round
for a properly paid job. For it was taken as settled that he
wouldn’t be a burden on his parents’ pockets a day longer
than was necessary. That his father would never have under¬
stood anyhow, and would have regarded as the worst of im¬
positions. As I have said, the question whether this excep¬
tionally gifted son (but did his parents have any clear idea
of his gift, had it manifested itself at all?) should not be
granted some exceptional liberty, such as a few years’ study
in foreign countries, for example, was not raised. The finan¬
cial prospects of the family were favorable enough at that
time. But Franz would have needed push to have won such
a favor for himself. And what was there that Franz lacked
more than push? His energy was directed inwards only and,
anyhow, manifested itself as stubbornness, a passive tenacity.
Herein perhaps lay the fatal weakness of his life. He suffered
and kept silent. At the same time one must also not forget
that the special nature of his gift, in fact, and not only in the
minds of his parents, precluded its being turned to any prac¬
tical value. Furthermore, to turn it to any such practical
value was utterly and completely incompatible with the pu¬
rity of Franz’s idea of art. “Writing is a form of prayer,” the
diary affirms. Indeed, when it came to the point of choosing
a profession, Franz postulated his job should have nothing
to do with literature. That he would have regarded as a de¬
basing of literary creation. Breadwinning and the art of writ¬
ing must be kept absolutely apart, a “mixture” of the two,
such as journalism, for example, represents, Kafka rejected—
although at the same time he never laid down dogmas, but
merely withdrew, as it were, with a smile, explaining that “I
just can’t do it.” He influenced me and my choice of a profes¬
sion for years with these views of his and, like himself, out of
respect for art, I went through agonies, in the most hideous,
prosaic, dry, profession of the law and didn’t find the road to
theatrical and musical criticism until years later. Today I
regard Kafka’s severity on this point as a noble error, and re¬
gret the hundreds of joyless hours I let slip by in a mood al¬
most of despair, wasting God’s high creation, time, in offices
just like those in which Kafka now set out on his martyr’s
way.
What we both strove after with burning ardor was a post
with a “single shift”—that is, office from early morning till
two or three in the afternoon—now I can write this “or” so
easily as though to us at the time it didn’t seem as if the whole
health of our souls depended on this one hour—and none in
the afternoon. Jobs with commercial firms, which meant be¬
ing in the office mornings and afternoons, didn’t leave any
continuous stretch of the day over for literary work, walks,
reading, the theater, and so on. And even when one came
home after three, by the time one had eaten, recovered a
little from the soul-destroying work, and was ready to switch
over into the state of freedom one had been looking forward
to—there was already very little of the day left. The desired
office hours till two o’clock only were offered by extremely
few offices, however, being almost exclusively in Govern¬
ment offices which even then, under the old Austrian Empire,
were open to Jews only if they had influence in very high
quarters. I don’t want here to go into the story of all our dis¬
appointed hopes of suitable jobs which haunted our conver¬
sation at that time. It will suffice to say that Kafka, after a
short prelude in the most strenuous of commercial offices
(the “Assicurazioni Generali”), finally achieved the longed-
for job in July 1908, in a semi-Govemment office, the
“Workers’ Accident Insurance Institute for the Kingdom of
Bohemia, in Prague.”
In both posts Franz had men over him who were well dis¬
posed towards him. Nevertheless it soon became evident that
he couldn’t get on with it, in spite of all his experiments in
dividing up his time in such a way as to allow him to indulge
unrestrictedly in his passion—writing. For that he needed a
succession of many hours, to permit the great impetus which
his creative power gave him to soar to its proper climax and
then die down again. But this was impossible for Kafka in
one short afternoon with the prospect of the next barren day
in the insurance institute always in front of him—for me, who
had to go through the analogous experience shortly after¬
wards, it was only half possible by the application of extreme
energy and concentration. So hard times began for both of
us. Significant of what we suffered is the poem I wrote dur¬
ing one of the holiday tours we made together, and which I
dedicated to my friend. Kafka tried sleeping in the afternoon
and writing at night. That always went all right for a certain
length of time, but he was not getting his proper sleep—
Franz suffered from poor sleep, and an unusual sensitivity to
noise anyhow—conditions of exhaustion set in, and so he had
to call upon his last reserves of strength to get through his
work in the office. A lot was expected of him there, among
other things jobs that he described—and this is the strongest
word of disapproval I have ever heard from him—as “dis¬
gusting,” as for example a kind of press campaign against not
unjustified attacks to which social insurance was then ex¬
posed. This explains an entry in the diary, “A sophistical
article written for and against the institute.” (What irony
that he didn’t after all completely escape joumalisml) Here
is the poem I mentioned above:

LAKE LUGANO
To Franz Kafka
With their delicate wings outspread.
Dragonflies glittered above our legs
Dangling in the water as we sat on the sun-baked wall,
To them we might seem like rocks.
80
 High above us wound the road
Bright with lime-dust scorched clean and white.
And from the vineyard rich grapes did greet us
And coolth descended caressing like a gentle woman.

Our bodies bore the warm tan of the generous sun.

But our souls, dear Friend, knew no peace or richness
And shook with thoughts and words, dark distant but searing,
Despite the beauty that cradled us
We knew that near days would bend us and bleach us
With the same relentless burden.

The years that I spent as an official in the post office, and

during which I wrote, among other things, in the afternoons
and evening, my Tycho Brahe, remain so dimly in my mem¬
ory that I can hardly see a single detail any more. It has all
been forcibly crammed into the maw of the subconscious.
Perhaps it may yet emerge once again. What remains is a di¬
rect sympathy for the almost unrealizable suffering that
weighs on the working classes—that weighs on all who have
to do work that does not interest them. Suffering that has
been raised to a degree that one can only describe as fan¬
tastic by the “Taylor System” and the “conveyor belt.” How
can such suffering be borne at all? Perhaps we are all only
dreaming that it is borne—this almost unimaginable suf¬
fering—because in reality it surpasses the limits of human
powers of resistance, and of what is unfortunately the same
thing in this case, of the possibilities of human degradation.
The attitude towards social problems which wants to see a
fair distribution of the burden of labor meets with my full
approval—but my own experience points to a quite different
problem that lies much deeper, to the question of the happi¬
ness of labor, joy in one’s work, in one’s own handicraft. Per¬
haps I shall have more to say on that point later.
A few days ago, after an interval of many years, I was once
again on the premises of the Workers’ Accident Insurance in
Porfc street, at the scene of Franz Kafka’s daily work. How
often I had been to see him there, walked up and down with
him in one of the bleak, echoing corridors. This time I spoke
to one of the head officials who once worked with Kafka.
81
Franz Kafka, so the gentleman told me, was popular with
everyone; he hadn’t a single enemy. His devotion to duty was
exemplary; his work was very highly thought of. The gentle¬
man emphasized that Franz Kafka attacked every question
from the opposite end of that from which everyone else gen¬
erally did. (A very apposite remark on the part of the gentle¬
man, who, be it noted, did not know that Kafka had since
become world famous.) Another thing he emphasized was a
certain naivete in Kafka’s make-up. He was “our office baby.”
He told me a story that is very characteristic of Kafka. “One
day he came into my office just as I was eating a slice of bread
and butter. ‘How can you swallow that fat?’ he said. ‘A lemon
is the best food.’ ”
His department in the Workers’ Accident Insurance Insti¬
tute was the study of the prevention of accidents and the
appeals in respect of the classification of trades under the
various degrees of risk.
He himself never considered his professional work was
first-class. His superiors, however, thought very highly of it.
He used to talk of the specialized knowledge and the “clever¬
ness” of his boss—Marschner—with an admiration that bor¬
dered on enthusiasm.
His social conscience was greatly stirred when he saw
workers crippled through neglect of safety precautions.
“How modest these men are,” he once said to me, opening
his eyes wide. “They come to us and beg. Instead of storming
the institute and smashing it to little pieces, they come and
beg.”
The annual report of the accident institute for the year
1909 contains an article I give below which Kafka wrote as
a clerk of the office. Naturally, Kafka is not mentioned by
name in the report itself. But I remember exactly Kafka bring¬
ing me the annual report that year, and telling me this article
was his work. His boss had corrected his draft, but Kafka’s
style can be seen unmistakably in passages here and there
even in this technical work. The high official who was kind
enough to see me also pointed out the passage, as well as an-
82
other one in the annual report for 1910, and told me they were
Franz Kafka’s work.
Here is an extract from this document which is interesting
in more respects than one:
‘Our illustrations show the difference between square
spindles and cylindrical spindles as it affects the technique
for the prevention of accidents. The cutters of the square
spindle are connected by means of screws direct to the spin¬
dle and rotate with exposed cutting edges at speeds of 380 to
400 revolutions per minute. The dangers to the operator, pre¬
sented by the large space between the cutter spindle and the
surface of the table, are obvious. Such spindles were used
either because the danger was not recognized, which may
incidentally have increased the danger, or with the knowl¬
edge of the presence of a permanent danger which could not
be avoided. Although an extremely cautious operator could
take care not to allow any joint of his fingers to project from
the timber when guiding it over the cutter head, the main
danger defied all caution. The hand of even the most cautious
operator was bound to be drawn into the cutter space if it
slipped, particularly when, as often happened, the timber
was hurled back (by the cutter block) while the operator
was pressing the article to be planed against the table with
one hand and feeding it to the cutter spindle with the other.
This lifting and recoiling of the timber could not be antici¬
pated nor prevented as it may have been due to gnarls or
knots in the timber, to an insufficiently high cutting-speed,
to warped cutters, or to uneven pressure of the operator’s
hands on the article. In such accidents usually several joints,
and even whole fingers, were severed. Not only every pre¬
caution but also all protecting devices seemed to fail in the
face of this danger, as they either proved to be totally in¬
adequate or, whereas they reduced the danger on the one
hand (automatic covering of the cutter slot by a protecting
slide, or by reducing the width of the cutter space), they in¬
creased it on the other by not allowing the chippings suffi¬
cient space to leave the machine, which resulted in choked
83
cutter spaces and in injured fingers when the operator at¬
tempted to clear the slot of chippings.
“By turning back the spindle according to Schrader’s pat¬
ent and flattening it in a gentle slope right up to the cutters,
clogging up of the cutter block will be avoided, whereby easy
feeding of the timber to the cutter spindle and sufficient space
for the chippings to leave the machine will also be effected.
“The most important point in this connection, however,
from the point of view of the prevention of accidents is that
only the cutting edges of the cutters should be permitted to
project, and that these cutters, forming as it were an integral
part of the spindle, can be very thin without danger of frac¬
ture.”
It is clear that Kafka derived a great amount of his knowl¬
edge of the world and of life, as well as his skeptical pessi¬
mism, from his experiences in the office, from coming into
contact with workmen suffering under injustice, and from
having to deal with the long-drawn-out process of official
work, and from the stagnating life of files. Whole chapters of
the novels The Trial and The Castle derive their outer cov¬
ers, their realistic wrappings, from the atmosphere Kafka
breathed in the Workers’ Accident Institute. Compare too
the sketch “New Lamps,” and an entry in the diary dated
July 2, 1913: “Wept over the account of the trial of twenty-
three-year-old Marie Abraham, who, through want and hun¬
ger, strangled her almost nine-months’ old child with a tie
which she was using as a garter and which she unwound for
the purpose. A thoroughly typical story.” Compare also the
following scheme for reform, which is almost unique in
Kafka’s work, drawn up towards the end of his life, the plan
of a workers’ collective, voluntary of course, almost monastic.

Guild of Workmen without Possessions

“Duties.—(1) To own or accept no money, no valuables.

The following the only possessions allowed: the simplest
clothing (details to be settled), materials necessary for work,
books, food enough for one’s own needs. Everything else be-
84
longs to the poor. (2) To earn one’s keep only by work. To
shrink from no work for which one has the strength without
damage to one’s health. Either to choose one’s work oneself,
or if that is not possible, to submit to the orders of the work
committee, which is under the orders of the government.
(3) To work for no other reward than one’s keep (to be set¬
tled according to the district, for two days). (4) The most
temperate life. To eat only what is absolutely necessary, for
example, as minimum recompense, which is in a certain
sense also maximum recompense; bread, water, dates. The
food of the poorest, the lodgings of the poorest. (5) To treat
the relationship with one’s employer as one of trust, never to
demand the intervention of a law court. Any work taken on
to be finished under all circumstances, except when serious
considerations of health prevent it.
“Rights.—(1) Maximum period of work, six hours; for
manual labor, four to five. (2) In the case of illness, and
when a man is too old to work, acceptance in a state home
for old people, hospitals.
“The working life to be a matter of conscience and faith in
one’s fellow-man.
“Property a man brings with him to be given to the state
for building hospitals and homes.
“For the present at least, exclusion of married men and
women.
“Advice—heavy responsibility—to be given by the govern¬
ment.
“Where a man can help, in forsaken districts, workhouses,
as teachers. . . .x
“Limit, 500 men.
“One year’s novitiate.”

Not that Kafka ever took any active part in political move¬
ments. But his reflective interest was claimed by any efforts
that aimed at improving the lot of man. That is why he zeal¬
ously attended Czech mass meetings and debates. I have
1 At the beginning of the third sentence from the end there is a line
in which I cannot make out the shorthand signs.

85
often heard him describe the characteristics of great popular
speakers like Soukup, Klofac, Kramar in detail, and generally
very critically. It wasn’t until after his death that I found out
by accident, while I was collecting the material about the
Czech anarchic-revolutionary movement of before the war
(1914) for my novel Stefan Rott, that Kafka was personally
known to one of the survivors of this movement, old Kacha.
On the basis of his authentic reports, confirmed also by other
sources, I was able to write these lines in my novel: “With
another group of Czechs seated at the table in this big inn
room sat another German guest, who looked very thin, and
very young, although he was apparently over thirty. He
didn’t utter a word the Whole evening, only looked on atten¬
tively with his great gray gleaming eyes, which stood out in
strange contrast to his brown face under his thick coal-black
hair.” It was Franz Kafka the writer. He often came and at¬
tended this gathering quite peacefully. Kacha liked him, and
called him a “klidas,” that is, a “close-mouth,” if one may be
allowed an attempt at creating something like Prague-Czech
slang. The gathering in question was the famous “Klub
Mladych,” the “Young People’s Club,” to which the Czech
writers Gelner, Toman, Sramek, Stanislav Neumann, Mares,
and Hasek also belonged.
Naturally Kafka’s office life was not always overshadowed
entirely by completely dark overtones. He had the ability to
make firm friends with his colleagues and subordinates, even
with some of them who were very simple or very confused.
For example, I find among my papers an extraordinary
memorandum written by one of these men that he brought
to me. It begins with the words “Nos exules filii Evae,” and at
the end it has a note on it in Franz’s handwriting, “From an
experience of the fifty-year-old author, which he hints at in
the beginning, grew this further program, ecstatically con¬
ceived, according to which a uniting of Polish Jews (Dalila—
the present Jewish mother) with the Slavs (Ursus—the pres¬
ent Slav man) shall effect the salvation of both, and the
creation of Samson, who will create a new religion.” Franz
brought the author of this curious memorandum along and
86
introduced him to me, and then we went all three of us to one
of the performances given by the Polish Jewish theater com¬
pany, about which I shall write more later.
In one of his letters, putting me off, his office work is de¬
scribed in the following humorous fashion which anticipates
a Charlie Chaplin film. “If you only knew how much I have
to dol In my four district headquarters—apart from all my
other work-people fall, as if they were drunk, off scaffolds
and into machines, all the planks tip up, there are landslides
everywhere, all the ladders slip, everything one puts up falls
down and what one puts down one falls over oneself. All
these young girls in china factories who incessantly hurl
themselves downstairs with mountains of crockery give one
a headache. By Monday I hope to be over the worst. . . .”
In his diary he wrote down in detail the experiences of a
young bookkeeper. But he found the dignity of those who
sit on high hard to bear. One day he came to me in the great¬
est excitement. He told me he had just done the silliest
thing—which might cost him the wonderful job he had man¬
aged to ferret out with so much trouble—and which he val¬
ued for his parents’ sake. What had happened was he had
been appointed drafting clerk. A high personage on the
Board of the institute had summoned the new drafting clerks
to his presence and given them a talk which was so solemn,
and so full of fatherly sanctimoniousness, that he (Franz)
had suddenly burst out laughing, and couldn’t stop. I helped
the inconsolable Franz to write a letter of apology to the
high official, who luckily turned out to be a considerate per¬
son, not without a sense of humor. It is altogether remark¬
able how Franz, as if in compensation for his inner repres¬
sions, hit upon people who were well disposed towards him,
who helped him on, or at least did not knowingly get too
much in his way—whereas other people, who have achieved
their own inner balance in life, have to scuffle almost the
whole time with obstructionists. Thus everything is reduced
to some kind of order—that is, it is all arranged for nobody to
have an easy time of it.
The happy and encouraging episodes in his profession
87
must, however, be considered as rare exceptions in the course
of a burden that daily grew heavier because it was daily felt
to be less and less bearable. The diary says such shattering
things on the subject of office work preventing him from
writing, that there is nothing more one can say on the sub¬
ject. But there is one utterance of his which must be under¬
lined, coming as it does from one who was otherwise so mod¬
est, that he had to force a piece of writing for his office out
of himself, as if he were tearing a piece of flesh out of his own
body, and who then in “great fear” sets forth “that everything
in me is ready for creative work, and such work would be a
heaven-sent solution of my problems and a real coming-to-
life, while here in the office for the sake of such a miserable bit
of an official document I must rob a body which is capable of
such happiness of a piece of its flesh.” There are, of course, in
the still unpublished parts of the diary other passages in the
same vein. And they rise to a really mighty climax when the
time comes for him to take up formally a share in a factory
in the interests of his family, and later to be constrained to
show, if only occasionally, a practical interest in this under¬
taking. That he finds unbearable. He knows, in fact, what
tremendous creative powers there are in him, which are
clamoring to be unleashed and which are pent up by re¬
sponsibilities of this kind. His complaint sounds very similar
to that letter from Paris in which Mozart wrote the following
refusal to his father who was urging him to start taking on
pupils. “You must not think it is laziness—no!—but because it
is utterly against my genius, against my way of life. . . . You
know that I am, as one might say, stuck fast in music—that I
am busied with it all day long—that I love to speculate—to
study—to think things over. But now here I am prevented
from doing so by this way of living (i.e. the lessons). I shall,
it is true, have a few hours free, only—these few hours I shall
need to rest in, rather than to work in.” Unfortunately there
will always be Philistines who are of the opinion that it is
enough if genius has “a few hours free”—they don’t under¬
stand that all the available hours barely suffice to guarantee to
an even tolerably uninterrupted ebb and flow of inspiration
88
and repose its right and proper far-flung arc of oscillation.
To those who are of the opinion that Kafka in all serious¬
ness considered his literary work bad or indifferent, and that
this was the reason for his refusing to publish anything, it
will come as rather a surprise to find him making the follow¬
ing entries in his diary concerning his “capacities,” and “how
they are irritated by the pernicious daily drudgery,” with
exactly the same confidence with which Mozart speaks of his
“genius” in the above letter. It is truly ridiculous also to sup¬
pose that genius—clear-sighted, form-bestowing genius-
should be in doubt about the powers which are most pe¬
culiarly its own. To the outer world Kafka did, it is true,
display a certain amount of self-depreciation—in comparison
with that which he strove after, with religious enlighten¬
ment, which was what finally concerned him most, he felt
himself petty—but that did not in the least prevent his esti¬
mating at its true worth the divine grace that had been con¬
ferred upon him and how perverse it was that it should meet
with temporal obstructionism. He writes:
“11/15/1911. Last night it was already with a certain pre¬
sentiment that I took the spread off my bed, lay down, and
again became conscious of all my capacities, just as if I were
holding them in my hand; they tightened my chest; they set
my head on fire; for a while, to comfort myself for not getting
up and working, I said over and over to myself, ‘It can’t be
good for you; it can’t be good for you,’ and tried, with an al¬
most visible effort to pull sleep over my head. I kept on think¬
ing of a cap with a brim which I was pulling hard down over
my forehead, to protect myself. How much I lost yesterday;
how my blood pulsed through my tight-packed head, capable
of anything, and only held back by forces which are in¬
dispensable for just keeping alive, and are being thrown
away here!
“Certain it is that everything that I have conceived be¬
forehand, although with a clear apprehension of every word,
or even only approximately but in definite words, when I sit
at my desk, when I try to set it on paper, seems dry, perverse,
stiff, embarrassing to the whole neighborhood, timid, but
89
above all full of gaps, although I have forgotten no jot of my
original conception. The explanation lies, of course, largely
in the fact that I conceive good things only when I am not
tied to paper, at the time of inspiration, which I dread rather
than long for, and that then the richness is so great that I
must renounce it, and so just follow blindly my luck, and
take things out of the flood, in handfuls, so that what I have
acquired, when I come to write it down in reflection, is noth¬
ing to compare with the richness in which it lived, is inca¬
pable of summoning this richness up and is therefore bad
and disturbing because it only entices one in vain.”
“12/28/1911. What agony the factory costs me! Why did
I not protest when they made me promise to work there in
the afternoons! Of course no one makes me do it by force, but
my father does by reproaches and K. by silence and my
guilty conscience. I know nothing about the factory, and this
morning when I was being shown over the factory I stood
around helpless and like a whipped schoolboy. I swear I shall
never be able to get to the bottom of all the details of the
workings of the factory. And if, after asking endless ques¬
tions and being a nuisance to all concerned, I were to do so,
what would the result be? I should not know any practical
use to put this knowledge to; I am built only for cooking up
something that looks all right, to which the sound common
sense of my boss 1 adds salt and makes it look like a really
good piece of work. But through this useless expenditure of
energy on the factory, on the other hand, I would rob myself
of the possibility of using the few hours of the afternoon for
myself, which could only lead to the complete destruction of
my existence, which is getting more and more circumscribed
as it is.”
“6/21/1912. The tremendous world I have in my head!
But how can I release it and release myself without tearing
myself apart? And it is a thousand times better to tear myself
apart than to keep it in check or buried in me. That is what
I am here for, of that I am quite clear.”
“The tremendous world I have in my head!” The diary is
1 i.e. in the Workers’ Accident Insurance.
90
alive with plans, sketches, and beginnings—only the very
smallest part of them carried out. Mozart resisted, and stood
up to his father. Kafka kept silence. But I have a letter of his
in which he makes the evil of his being caught up in his daily
work completely apprehensible. It is here, and not in his re¬
lations with his father, that, in my opinion, lie the roots of
his later absorption into the world of sorrows that finally led
to his illness and death. And only in so far as his exaggerated
feeling of his tie with his father held him firm in the bonds
of his profession did it contribute to the disaster—but the
disaster was essentially caused by the fact that a man so tre¬
mendously richly gifted, with such a rich creative urge, was
forced just at the time when his youthful strength was un¬
folding itself, to work day in and day out to the point of ex¬
haustion, doing things which inwardly didn’t interest him in
the least. This is what he says in his letter to me:

After some good writing in the night from Sunday to

Monday—I could have gone on writing all through the night,
and all day, and all night and all day, and finally flown away
—and today I am sure I could have written well, too—one
page, really only the last dying breath of yesterday’s ten, is
even finished. I must stop for the following reason: Mr. X,
the factory owner, early this morning went away on business,
which I, in my fond absent-mindedness, hardly noticed, and
will be off for ten or fourteen days. While he is away the fac¬
tory is really left in control of the works manager alone, and
no employer, least of all one so anxious as my father, will
doubt that the most utter fraud is now being perpetrated in
the factory. I myself in fact believe it too, although not so
much for the sake of the money, but because of my ignorance
and pangs of conscience. But after all, even an impartial per¬
son, so far as I can imagine such a person, couldn’t have very
much doubt that my father’s fears are justified, even though I
must not forget that I myself, at bottom, cannot comprehend
why a German works manager from Germany, even during
the absence of Mr. X, whose superior he is by far in every
technical and organizing question, should not be able to keep
91
everything running in the same good order as usual; for after
all, we are men, not thieves....
When I was trying to tell you some time ago that nothing
from outside can disturb me when I am writing (which was
said, of course, not as a boast, but to comfort myself), I was
only just thinking how my mother whimpers to me almost
every evening, that I should after all take a look at the factory
now and again just to keep father’s mind easy, and how
father has said the same thing, on his side, in a far nastier
way with looks and in other indirect ways. All this whimper¬
ing at me and reproaching me wouldn’t, for the most part,
amount to stupidity were it not that—and that, one can’t deny
it for all the world, is where the stupidity of all this talk lies—
I can’t bear such a control even in my brightest moments.
But it’s not a question of that for the next fortnight, when
all that is necessary is that any pair of eyes, even mine, should
wander about over the factory. I can’t make the slightest ob¬
jection to this demand being made of me, of all people, be¬
cause everybody thinks that I am chiefly responsible for
founding the factory—though I must have taken this respon¬
sibility on in a dream, it seems to me at least—and moreover,
there is no one here besides me who can go to the factory,
because my father and mother, of whose going one couldn’t
dream, anyhow, are now in the middle of their busiest season
(business seems to be going better in the new shop, too) and
today, for example, mother didn’t even come home for lunch.
So when mother once more began the same old story this
evening, and, apart from the reference to making my father
unhappy and ill by my behavior, produced the further reason
of Mr. X’s business journey and the complete desertion of the
factory, a wave of bitterness—I don’t know if it was only gall
—passed through my whole body, I saw perfectly that I had
only the alternatives of either waiting until everyone had
gone to bed and then jumping out of the window, or of going
every day to the factory and sitting in X’s office every day for
the next fourteen days. The former would have given me the
opportunity of rejecting all responsibility both for interrupt¬
ing my writing and for deserting the factory, the latter
92
would have interrupted my writing without any doubt—I
can’t just rub fourteen nights’ sleep out of my eyes—and
would leave me, if I had enough strength of will and hope,
the prospect of perhaps being able to begin again where I
stopped today, fourteen days later.
So I didn’t jump out through the window, and also the
temptation to make this letter a letter of farewell (my mo¬
tives for writing it he in quite a different direction) is not
very strong. I stood at the window a long time, and pressed
my face against the glass, and I more than once felt like
frightening the toll collector on the bridge by my fall. But I
felt too firm a hold on myself the whole time for the decision
to dash myself to pieces on the pavement to be able to de¬
press me to the necessary level. It also seemed to me that by
staying alive I should interrupt my writing less—even if one
does nothing, nothing, but talk of interruptions—than by
dying, and that between the beginning of my novel and its
continuation after a fortnight, I might somehow in the fac¬
tory, in full view of my satisfied parents, move and have my
being in the heart of my novel.
My dearest Max, I am putting the whole case before you,
not because I want you to judge it, for you are not in a posi¬
tion to have any judgment on it, but since I had firmly de¬
cided to jump from my window without writing a letter of
farewell—after all one has the right to be tired just before the
end—now that I am going to walk back into my room again
as its occupant, I wanted to celebrate it by writing you a long
letter of meeting again, and here it is.
And now a last kiss and good night, so that tomorrow I
can do what they want of me, and be the boss of the factory.

When I read the letter, I was gripped by cold horror. I

wrote freely and openly to Franz’s mother, and pointed out
to her the danger of suicide in which her son stood. Of
course, I asked her not to mention my intervention to Franz.
The answer which I received on October 7, 1912, is full of
touching mother love. She begins, “I have just received your
letter, and you can see from the way my writing shakes how
93
much it has upset me. I, who would give my heart’s blood for
any of my children, to make them all happy, am helpless in
this case. But nevertheless I shall do everything in my power
to see my son happy.” The mother then outlines a scheme for
a white lie. She wanted to pretend to the father, who had to
be kept from any shock because of his illness, that Franz was
going to the factory every day, and in the meantime look
around for another partner. “I shall speak to Franz this very
day, without mentioning your letter, and tell him he needn’t
go to the factory tomorrow any more. I hope he will listen to
me and calm himself. I beg you, too, dear Doctor, to calm him
and thank you ever so much for the way you love Franz.”
One’s verdict on the affair depends upon what relation it
bore to Franz’s writing, and the importance one gives to that.
“Writing as a form of prayer” is, as I have said, the most
revealing entry in the diary. From the account that Franz has
left, unfortunately only in a fragmentary form, of his inter¬
view with the anthroposophist Dr. Rudolf Steiner, it is clear
that while he was working Franz experienced conditions
that “very clearly resemble the conditions of second sight”
which Dr. Steiner has described. He compares his creative
work with a “new occult doctrine, a kind of Cabala.” Literary
work was his “sole desire,” his “sole profession,” he says in
the draft of a letter to his presumptive father-in-law, which is
not only remarkable in itself but also significant in more di¬
rections than one. And on August 6, 1914, he writes in his
diary: “My preoccupation with portraying my dreamlike
inner life has relegated everything else to a secondary posi¬
tion; other interests have shrunk in a most dreadful fashion,
and never cease to shrink. Nothing else can ever make me
happy. But it is impossible to calculate how much strength I
have for this portrayal. It may already have vanished for¬
ever; it may come back to me once again, but the circum¬
stances under which I live are not favorable to it. So I vacil¬
late, fly incessantly to the peak of the mountain, but cannot
rest on the height for a moment.” “I have a mandate,” he ex¬
plained in another passage, and at first it would appear that
it was a question of a purely literary mandate, were it not
94
that fundamentally one feels right from the start that it is a
religious question that lies at the back of the literary one—a
religious question after the peculiar quality of Kafka’s re¬
ligion, which was a religion of the life fulfilled, of work, good
work, that fulfils life significantly, of co-ordination in the
right and proper life of national and human community.
“To be alone brings nothing but punishment”—this sen¬
tence from the diary is a leitmotiv that occurs again and
again with Kafka, and finds its strongest positive expression
just in the last piece he wrote, in the story called “Josephine
the Songstress—or The Mice-Nation.” On January 6, 1914,
after reading Dilthey’s “Experience and Imagination,” he
wrote down, “Loving one’s fellow-man, having the highest
respect for everything in its perfected forms, standing back
calmly on the most suitable observation platform.” The let¬
ters to Oskar Poliak (“It’s better to bite Life than to bite one’s
tongue”) repeatedly bring out the motive of active participa¬
tion.
And at the end of 1913 we find the following formulation:
“The uniformity of mankind, which every man, even the best
of mixers and the most adaptable of men at one time or
another begins to doubt, even if only sentimentally, on the
other hand reveals itself, too, to every man, or at least ap¬
pears to reveal itself in the complete community of the de¬
velopment of mankind as a whole, and as individuals, which
we come across again and again. And this even in the most
isolationist feelings of individuals.” Is this written by the
same man in whose work descriptions of the most utter hu¬
man distances and loneliness occur over and over again, such
as in all the animal stories (the soul of the animal cannot be
got at by a human being), such as the ideology of the mole
in The Giant Mole, or the still unpublished fragment from
August 1914 which begins with the sentence, “At one time in
my life I had a job with a small railroad in the heart of Rus¬
sia,” and which then goes on, “The wider the loneliness that
surrounded me, the better pleased I was”? Two opposite
tendencies fought for supremacy in Kafka: the longing for
loneliness, and the will to be sociable. But you don’t under-
95
stand Kafka properly until you realize that the tendency to
loneliness (which undeniably existed in him) he disapproved
of, and it was life in the social community and significant
work that meant the highest goal and ideal for him—the life
into which K., the hero of the Castle novel, tries in vain to
thrust himself.
So, too, all the many pictures of a bachelor’s life which
play so great a part in his work are absolutely to be appre¬
hended as the image in reverse of what is right and what is to
be striven for. It is true that Kafka needed loneliness for his
literary work, he needed a high degree of self-absorption,
such as could sometimes be disturbed by a conversation—as
his diary tells us—such as even communicating it to a friend
could endanger. But he examined himself minutely. In 1911
he makes this discovery about himself: “In periods of transi¬
tion such as I have undergone the last few weeks, and of
which the present moment is yet even more marked, I am
often seized with a sad but calm astonishment at my lack of
feeling. I am separated from everything by a space to whose
limits I can’t even force my way out.” And in March 1912,
“who will confirm for me the truth or probability of the fact
that solely as a result of my literary bent I am without inter¬
est in anything else, and heartless.”
O, all too conscientious friend! Your literary work itself
was after all for you only the symbol of a life well lived, but
it was at the same time something much more too; it was the
thing itself, it was your life, it was the right and proper use
of the powers you were bom with. It was that which you de¬
manded of yourself and of all mankind: not to misuse the
good powers one has been given, not to let them decay, but
to make every use of them to fulfil the “Mandate,” and in this
way to enter into the “Law,” thrusting aside the wicked man
at the gate who tries to keep one from entering in. It is dif¬
ficult, all the same. The temptations are many. “Once you
have followed the false alarm of the night-bell—you can
never put it right again.” “Nobody, nobody can point you the
way to India. Even then [in the time of Alexander] the gates
of India were inaccessible, but the King’s sword pointed the
96
way. Today the gates have been conveyed elsewhere, to a
more distant, a higher place; nobody points the way; many
carry swords; but only to flourish them, and the gaze that
would follow them is confused.” (From the collection The
Country Doctor.) And yet the “incorruptible,” “indestruct¬
ible” in us remained. We look for it “far from the battle of Al¬
exander,” we read and turn over the “pages of our old books,”
wait for the arrival of the “imperial emissary.” It is just as the
Rabbi Tarfon in his Sayings of the Fathers taught us with
exactly the same elastic tension between pessimism and op¬
timism, “It is not granted you to complete the task—and yet
you may not give it up.”
His literary work was not the be-all and end-all for Kafka,
however much many passages in his diary, if taken literally,
might seem to say so. His business was a little different from
that of Flaubert, for whom art really meant the essence and
the proper meaning of existence, which was almost always
(almost, please!) looked on skeptically and with hostility by
Flaubert. But look at Kafka in contrast: “Our art consists of
being dazzled by the Truth. The light which rests on the dis¬
torted mask as it shrinks from it is true, nothing else is.” Art
is a reflection of religious experience. But with Kafka art is a
way to God, not only in this sense—he who shrinks back also
sees the way, indeed it is the way from which he shrinks back
—but also in the positive sense explained above—as a mid¬
wife for a man’s powers, as a governess teaching the fulfil¬
ment of life according to one’s natural abilities. Thus Kafka
affirmed on August 15, 1914: “I have been writing for a few
days, may it continue! So completely protected and wrapped
up in my work as I was two years ago,11 am not now, but all
the same I have got the feeling that my regular, empty, mad,
bachelor life has some justification. I can once more hold a
conversation with myself, and am not gazing into such a com¬
plete blankness. This is the only way in which I can ever get
better.”
Thus art serves the religious principle of giving a meaning
1 In 1912 Kafka wrote “The Verdict,” “The Stoker,” and The Meta¬
morphosis.
97
 to life. As work, as an unfolding of good creative abilities
given by God, it has the same rights as other work which men
do, which is significant and constructive and leads the writer
out of the desert of idleness back into the circle of the active
communal existence. All the same, writing, of however high
a standard, was not enough according to Kafka’s lights. Other
things were needed to become a fully qualified citizen of this
earth, e.g. founding a family. I shall never forget the deep
emotion with which Kafka read to me the last paragraph of
Souvenirs intimes by Flaubert’s niece, Caroline Comman-
ville. The passage describes how Flaubert sacrificed to his
idol “La Litterature,” everything—love, tenderness—every¬
thing, and the author asks if he never towards the end of his
life regretted this departure from the “route commune.” She
is inclined to believe he did. A few excited words that Flau¬
bert once said to her on one of their last walks together led
her to think so. They had been to see a woman friend of
theirs, and found her in the midst of her charming children.
As they were walking back home along the Seine, Flaubert
said, “11s sont dans le vrai’ . . . [Commanville explains] en
faisant allusion k cet interieur de famille honnete et bon.
‘Oui,’ se repetait-il a lui-meme gravement, ‘ils sont dans le
vrai’ . . Kafka often quoted this sentence. Art alone then
had not been enough for him on which to build a proper life.
But it was an indispensable part of the foundation of it, it was
at the same time the beginning, the innermost circle, upon
the health of which other circles depended. One can under¬
stand from this the deep tragedy that lay in the fact that cir¬
cumstances prevented him from taking this first step towards
a fulfilled, which is to say in his sense a good, religious life,
from properly saying the prayer which he felt he was capable
of saying. Had he been allowed to let his artistic capabilities
have their full run, undoubtedly many other things would
have gone better for him later on. As it didn’t happen, the
harmful effect of having a profession forced upon him in
which he found no pleasure, gradually worked down into the
metaphysical depths.
That is obviously not to say that, had one first step suc-
98
ceeded, Kafka would have solved all the other problems of
his life smoothly. But without the first step, failure was cer¬
tain. Only that can be recognized, and no more. It seems in¬
deed that many of Kafka’s problems bordered at least very
closely on the absolutely insoluble. Nevertheless—given a
maximum of physical and spiritual inviolacy (a maximum
which was precluded in advance by the slavery of his pro¬
fession) we should—of that I am convinced—have expe¬
rienced in Kafka’s later development things which go far
beyond our present stock of ideas.

99
 CHAPTER IV

UP TO THE PUBLICATION
OF “CONTEMPLATION’

THE brief summer holidays which freed us from the thrall of

our office work for two or three weeks, gained a double sig¬
nificance for us through this association. To be free for a few
whole days, to be able to meet the world and fresh people
without bothering and with open minds—we enjoyed this
happiness with the unbroken strength of youth. We went on
our holidays together, and looked forward to them for
months beforehand, made our preparations for them with a
care that we ourselves laughed at more than anyone, but
which lit up the gray workday like a ray of sunshine. The
day we could leave came at last! Never in my life have I been
so equably cheerful as during weeks of holiday spent with
Kafka. We turned into happy children, we hit upon the
queerest, loveliest jokes—it was a great happiness to live in
Kafka’s neighborhood and to enjoy at first hand his lively
thoughts as they bubbled forth—even his hypochondria was
still entertaining and full of ideas.
Moreover, it was not only the long summer holidays that
we spent together, but all the year round there were lots of
excursions in Prague’s immediate and farther neighborhood.
Many a summer we took long walking tours every Sunday. At
Easter and Whitsuntide we stayed away two or three days,
and at other times, too, we often left the town as early as
Saturday afternoon. Felix Weltsch was generally a third in
the party. We hiked (so I find out from my diary, alongside
the adjective “indescribably beautiful”) seven or eight hours
a day; it was our sport. Bathing in brooks and rivers was part
of it. We used to swim, we used to sun ourselves, we got
hardened. One day the young Franz Werfel, still a schoolboy
then, was taken along with us to Senohrab, and introduced
to our uninhibited nature-life. He got horribly sunburnt in
100
doing so. The poems of his which he read aloud to us on the
reedy banks of the Sazawa moved us to enthusiasm. I shall
quote here one of the many original letters I have in which
Kafka used to propose excursions like this.

My dear Max
Don’t rush into a great outlay of cash on an express letter
to say you can’t be at the Franz Joseph Station at 6.05, be¬
cause you must be, since the train we are going to take to
Wran leaves at 6.05. At 7.45 we shall walk the first step to¬
wards Davie, where we shall eat a goulash at Lederer’s. At
12 o’clock we shall lunch at Stechowitz, from two till a quar¬
ter to four we shall walk through the woods to the rapids on
which we shall row about a bit. At seven we shall take a
steamer back to Prague. Don’t think any more about it, but
be at the station at a quarter to six. Apart from that, you may
after all write a special-delivery letter to say you would like
to go to Dobrichowitz or somewhere else.

We spent countless happy hours on the boards of the bath¬

ing establishments of Prague, in rowboats on the Vltava, in
doing climbing stunts on the mill weirs, many an echo of
which you can find in my novel Stefan Rott. I admired
Franz’s swimming and rowing. He was particularly clever at
handling a so-called “man-drowner.” He was always less
clumsy, bolder than myself, and had a special trick of leaving
one to one’s fate in breakneck situations with an almost cruel
smile which seemed to say something like “Help yourself.”
How I adored that smile, in which, after all, there lay also so
much confidence and encouragement. Franz was inexhausti¬
ble in finding out new lines of sport, or so it seemed to me.
In this too his personality expressed itself, this too he did, as
he did everything, with complete abandon.
Our first summer holiday together began September 4,
1909, and took us to Riva. Kafka, my brother Otto, and I
spent many hours of contemplation in the little bathing place
under the Ponale road, at the “Bagni della Madonnina.”
When I came back to Riva after the war, I no longer found
101
the lovely sunny gray boards, and no longer saw the gleaming
lizards gliding over the garden paths that had led the way
down from the dusty road full of cars to the cool place of the
spa. Unforgettable, modest little establishment, under the
towering walls of cliffs, I have dedicated an obituary to you
and the happiness we found in your bay—here we ourselves
were guests of peace, of the classic simplicity of the South.
Never since has the South revealed herself to us so kindly and
so exalted at the same time. Kafka, too, in later years was
drawn once more to visit Riva; but he lived there alone, in
1913, after his first great unhappy love affair, in the Hartun-
gen sanatorium on the other side of the lake.
In 1909 we were all still doing very well And even the dis¬
cussions we had with Dallago, the poet and apostle of nature,
who came to visit the same bathing resort as ourselves, failed
to disturb our comfort. The traveling experiences of my
brother, who was much more useful in practical things than
I, and whom Kafka very much admired, helped us out of
many a difficulty. My brother had, so to speak, “discovered”
Riva for us, had been there already the year before, and now
took us the easiest way to everything that was beautiful and
of interest. One photograph is of Franz under the colonnades
of Castell Toblino, another shows him with my brother
sitting on his haunches on a slab of marble in the green
wilderness on the shore of the lake.
Into the idyll of the Madonnina Spa burst the newspaper
story—of course we were reading nothing at the time except
the Italian local papers from Riva—that the first flying meet
was to take place at Brescia. We had never yet seen a flying
machine, so we decided with great enthusiasm, although
funds were low, to go to Brescia. Kafka was keener than any¬
body on making the trip—and this is I think a good place once
again emphatically to point out how false die view is that
considers Kafka was at home in an ivory tower, a world of
fantasies far removed from life, and imagines him as an
ascetic consumed by nothing other than religious specula¬
tions. He was entirely different: he was interested in every¬
thing new, topical, technical, as for example, in the begin-
102
nings of the film; he never proudly withdrew himself, even
in the case of abuses and excrescences of modern develop¬
ment, he went down to their roots with patience and inex¬
haustible curiosity, preserved his hopes in man’s common
sense, never, in proud “distinction,” never, in the attitude of
Stefan George, rejected contact with the inferior, organized
world around him. Only what was dirty, immoral, seemed to
have no attraction for him. He had the wonderful gift of find¬
ing it just boring. Thus, for example, I could never persuade
him to read more than a line or two of Casanova—whom I
then rated more highly than his deserts perhaps, but whom I
still find significant and worth reading.
Brescia was overcrowded. As we had to be very careful of
our money, we finally spent the night in a room which we
thought must be a den of robbers, and in the middle of the
floor of which—even today I ask myself if it can’t be a trick of
my memory perhaps—was a large circular hole, through
which one could look down into the taproom which lay un¬
derneath. We thought Sparafucile was bound to join us at
any moment. But the next day, in the sunlight on the aero¬
drome, we laughed the unpleasant hours of the night to
smithereens. On our way back, when we spent a night at
Desenzano, I must admit we were driven into the streets by
the bugs that lurked behind hundreds of pictures of saints,
and we sat shivering on the benches on the quay by the lake
side waiting for the morning. Yes, that is how we traveled in
those days; we knew nothing of first-class hotels, and yet
were heedlessly jolly. It was, one must admit, a time which
had its great advantages. Riva was Austrian, Brescia Italian.
There was occasionally some talk of tension; there were
rumors about the underground fortresses of Monte Brione
near Riva, but fundamentally nobody took it seriously; war
was an unreal idea, something like the philosopher’s stone
and, when we crossed the frontier on our walks, we didn’t
even notice it.
The first flights we saw made a great impression on us. I
told Franz he must immediately take notes of everything he
observed, and gather them together into an article. By the
103
idea of making it a sporting competition between him and
me, I made it attractive to him. I was going to write an ar¬
ticle, too, and we should decide who had succeeded in mak¬
ing the best remarks. Playful, not to say childish aims of
this nature seldom failed in their effect on Kafka. For ex¬
ample, it gave him tremendous pleasure when we made this
excursion and took great pains to hide our first reactions from
each other, and to betray nothing of what we felt about the
things we saw. Only at the end one might see who had hit
the mark.
But behind all this solicitation I had a secret plan. At the
time Kafka’s literary work was lying fallow; for months he
had not produced anything, and he often complained to me
that his talent was obviously seeping away, that it had com¬
pletely and utterly gone from him. Indeed he sometimes
lived for months in a kind of lethargy, in utter despair; in my
diary I find note after note on his sadness. Le coeur triste,
Fesprit gai—this description fits him excellently and explains
how it was that, even when he himself was in the most de¬
pressed state, he never, except perhaps in the hour of extreme
intimacy, had a depressing, but rather a stimulating effect on
those with whom he went about. But how deeply he suffered,
I knew even then from many a confession, and so I wanted to
give him a concrete example of how one must pull oneself
together, wanted to prove to him that his fears of literary
barrenness were without foundation, that it only needed a
certain amount of will, a certain amount of concentration, to
bring his gift into working order again.
My plan succeeded. The article “The Aeroplanes at
Brescia” Franz wrote with joy, finished it, and then had it
published, very much cut, at the end of September 1909, in
Bohemia. I had handed it to Paul Wiegler, at that time editor
of Bohemia—and later succeeded in persuading Franz to let
me publish it without cuts next to my own essay on the same
theme in my book “On the Beauty of Ugly Pictures.” In this
book I introduced Franz’s essay with the following remarks:
“It is really an extremely far-fetched, and at the same time
also banal idea that only one author should get a hearing in
104
one book. And if we two friends, inseparable in our thoughts
on this journey and in other things, have always stood so near
to each other in a foreign land, shall we not dare do so in this
book in our own home? And what if these two variations on
the same theme would not have come into being the one
without the other, although the two authors kept their ideas
secret from one another with comic and purposely exag¬
gerated fear, or even, in the heat of rivalry, attacked the third
fellow-traveler, my brother Otto, for advice? What if these
variations, then, belong to one another, complete one another,
make one another clearer, beautify one another? And what if
we wish it? And what if nothing can be done about it any¬
way?” I have the galley proofs of the two essays in front of
me. I was proud to have effected the first publication of
Kafka in book form in this way. But, alas, it never got further
than good will. In the end the book turned out to be far too
long, and at the wish of the publisher, along with several
other essays, these two had also to be cut out of the final
set-up of the book. Kafka’s essay is now published as an ap¬
pendix to this book.
The article as such was not, of course, the end I had in
view, it was to serve only as an incitement to bring Franz’s
pleasure in creation into flow again. This success I achieved.
Albeit always against the strong resistance the stubborn
author put up against me. At times I stood over him like a
rod, drove him and forced him, not directly naturally, but
again and again by new means and new tricks; at any rate I
didn’t let his gift break down again. There were times when
he thanked me for doing so. But often I was a burden to him
with my prodding and he wished it to the devil, as his diary
informs one. I felt that, too, but it didn’t matter to me. What
mattered to me was the thing itself, the helping of a friend
even against the wish of the friend.
I claim that it is thanks to me that this diary ever came into
being; even Franz’s quartos grew directly out of our little
notes on our joumeyings, were in fact in a certain sense
sequels to them. A conscious and already cultivated tendency
of Kafka’s to render such an account of his experiences found
105
fresh nourishment in the reportage of the journeys we did
together, and was now systematically developed. That is
exactly what I had wished for. The diaries have a significance
for Kafka which is not only autobiographical and an aid to
the mastery of his soul; in between remarks of a personal
content stand the pieces which he then later took for his first
book, “Contemplation.” In fact many of these pieces selected
by himself are, in their substance, indistinguishable from the
entries in the diary; we don’t know why the author con¬
sidered one worth publishing and kept back the other.
In the context of the diary 1 there are also many fragments
of short stories which have got thus or thus far; they pile up,
until suddenly out of the throng the first finished story of con¬
siderable length, “The Verdict,” shoots out like a jet of flame.
With it, during the night of September 22-23, 1912, the
writer succeeded in breaking through to the form that suits
him, and a powerful genius of the art of story telling, unique
in his genre, finally found his freedom.
In October of 1910, we went to Paris for our holidays.
There were Kafka, Felix Weltsch, my brother, and I. Our
circle of friends had grown, a development which had al¬
ready begun some years previously. I brought Kafka along to
Felix Weltsch and Oskar Baum. The clear-sighted philos¬
opher (“Grace and Freedom,” and “The Risks of the Via
Media,” are his most important books, and there is also the—
1 Here are some beautiful passages from entries in the diary: “One
advantage of keeping a diary is that one becomes conscious, with com¬
forting clarity, of the changes one is constantly undergoing, which one
also, in general, believes, guesses at and admits, but which one uncon¬
sciously denies, when it comes to extracting hope or peace out of any
such admission. In a diary one finds the proofs that one has oneself
lived, looked around, written down observations, under circumstances
which today appear unbearable; that, in fact, this right hand went
through the same movements as it does today, when we are of course
wiser about the conditions at that time, since we have the possibility of
having a bird’s-eye view of them, but are therefore all the more obliged
to recognize the fearlessness of our strivings at that time, which per¬
sisted despite all our lack of knowledge.” Another extract reads: “On
the way back home after saying goodbye, regret for my falseness, and
pain at its inevitability. Intention: to begin a notebook of my own on
my relations with Max. What one doesn’t write down flickers before
one’s eyes, and optical accidents determine the result.”
106
philosophical—treatise, “Perception and Concept,” which was
written in collaboration with me) —as well as the writer—who
in addition to the list of works quoted elsewhere has just writ¬
ten the impressive historical novel, “The People Who Slept
Hard”—felt drawn towards Kafka. Our foursome was also
unique in that between the pairs of friends there existed an
intimate friendship, in whose harmony no jarring note was
ever felt. The four of us came together regularly, and this for
many years gave our lives a firm rhythm.
Oskar Baum, the writer, describes how he first met Kafka
in the following words: “Our first meeting still remains quite
clear in my memory. It was Max Brod who brought it about.
He brought Franz Kafka along to my place and read to us,
that autumn afternoon in 1904, his short story, ‘Excursions
into the Dark Red,’ which he had just finished. We were little
more than twenty at the time. I can still remember many of
the things we said during the enthusiastic exchange of opin¬
ions in which the problems of the story involved us, and
which was carried on with the extremely controlled economy
of words which was then the fashion with us. Kafka, for
instance, among other things, said, ‘When there is no ne¬
cessity to digress from the action through tricks of style, the
temptation to do so is strongest.’
“Kafka’s first gesture as he came into my room left a
deep impression on me. He knew he was in the presence of a
blind man. And yet, as Brod was introducing him, he bowed
silently to me. It was, you might think, a senseless formality
in my case, since I couldn’t see it. His hair, which was
smoothed down, touched my forehead for a moment as he
bowed, probably because the bow that I made at the same
time was a little too violent. I was moved in a way that for
the moment I could see no clear reason for. Here was one of
the first people in the world who had made it clear that my
deficiency was something that concerned nobody but myself
—not by making allowances or being considerate, not by the
faintest change in his bearing. That was what he was like.
He stood so far from the accepted utility formulas, that he
affected one in this way. His severe, cool reserve was so
107
superior in depth of humanity to the ordinary run of kindness
—which I otherwise recognize when I am first introduced to
people in a pointless increase in warmth of words, or tone of
voice, or shake of the hand.
“This co-ordination of every involuntary movement, of
each everyday word with his whole personal outlook on life
made his behavior, his outward appearance, unusually full
of life, despite the abstract battles that continuously domi¬
nated his mind. When he read aloud—and that was his par¬
ticular passion—the emphasis on each separate word was
completely subordinated, although every syllable was per¬
fectly distinct—with his tongue sometimes working at a speed
which almost made one giddy—to a musical breadth of
phrasing, with enormously long breaths, and mightily swell¬
ing crescendos of the dynamic levels—just as you find them
in his prose, where you occasionally find that a complete
separate piece like “The Circus Equestrienne” has arisen in
the form of one marvelously constructed sentence.”
I don’t wish, however, to create the impression that Kafka
was to be met only in the innermost circle of the “Prague
Four.” On the contrary, it was much more in accordance with
his nature to try and meet everyone who seemed to share his
feelings, or at any rate, at least as long as his health lasted,
not to refuse to. Among the men who consorted with Kafka
are Martin Buber, Franz Werfel, Otto Pick, Ernst Weiss,
Willy Haas, Rudolf Fuchs, in later years the elocutionist
Ludwig Hardt, Wolfenstein, and many others. Perhaps a few
of them will still take up the tale, and complete the picture
of the life of Kafka (cf. Appendixes III and IV).
Our holiday in Paris was a failure owing to a small car¬
buncle that Franz developed, and a few terrifying experi¬
ences at the hands of French doctors. After a few days he
went back home to Prague. Kafka was always very sensitive
on the question of any risk to his health. Every imperfection
of the body tormented him, even, for example, scurf or con¬
stipation, or a toe that was not quite properly formed. He
distrusted drugs and doctors. He demanded that Nature
108
herself should restore the balance, and despised all “un¬
natural” medicines.
This tendency was strengthened in 1911, when, on a jour-
ney—probably on behalf of the office—to Wamsdorf, he met
the industrialist Schnitzer, who preached the “nature cure.”
I find the following entries on the subject in my notes dated
May 1911. “Kafka came back to Prague on Friday, but didn’t
come to see me or Baum. Finally, the following Thursday, I
rang him up in a temper.” He was “so weak, felt so rotten;
his stomach was out of order; he wasn’t going out at all, he
was so miserable.” On Friday afternoon he came to see me
and told me a lot of wonderful things about the garden city
of Wamsdorf, about a “magician,” a believer in natural heal¬
ing, a rich industrialist, who had examined him, had looked
only at his throat in profile, from the front, and had then
talked to him about poisons in his spinal marrow and almost
up to his brain already, which had developed through living
on the wrong lines. To cure them he recommended sleeping
with the windows open, sun-bathing, working in the garden,
joining in the activities of a club for natural healing and
subscribing to a magazine published either by the club or by
the industrialist himself. He speaks against doctors, medi¬
cines, and injections. He explains the Bible from a vegetarian
standpoint: Moses led the Jews through the desert so that
they might become vegetarians in these forty years. Manna
as a meatless diet. The dead quails. The longing for the
“fleshpots of Egypt.” Even more clearly, in the New Testa¬
ment Jesus addressed bread with the words, “This is my
body.” Franz’s attitude to the “natural health methods” and
reform movements of a similar nature was one of very intense
interest, nicely tempered by making good-natured fun of the
follies and fads which go along with these movements. Fun¬
damentally he saw in the efforts to create a new healthy man,
and to use the mysterious and freely proffered healing
powers of nature something extremely positive which agreed
with many of his own instincts and convictions, and which
he widely put into practice too. He slept with the window
open all the year round. When you went to his place to see
109
him, the cool fresh air there was a thing that struck you. He
always wore light clothing, even in winter, went for long
periods without eating meat and drank no alcohol. When he
became ill he infinitely preferred being looked after in a
private house (in Ziirau), in a primitive country district, to
any sanatorium, and only went to sanatoriums when he was
finally forced to do so.
In 1910 there was another important meeting. For May 1
of this year I find this entry in my diary: “Cafe Savoy. Theat¬
rical company from Lemberg. Very important for J. F.”—the
novel I was planning at the time. For May 4: “Went with
Kafka to the Savoy this evening. Marvelous!” Franz’s notes
about this Polish Jewish troupe of actors who acted folk
drama in Yiddish, and sang in Yiddish, don’t begin until the
following year, but from then on they fill many pages of the
copybooks, and the greatest actors have seldom been written
about with such love and such penetrating understanding,
not only with regard to their art, but also to their private
lives, as Kafka devoted to describing Mr. and Mrs. Klug, Mr.
and Mrs. Tschissik, Mr. Pipes, and above all, the young Isak

I was the prime mover in this case. That was just the beau¬
tiful thing about our friendship, that I learned from Kafka
in many points, as I have already explained, but in other
questions Kafka followed my lead. Generally, I must admit,
in these cases, he guided the first impulse which he received
from me into a depth and a breadth I had never before sus¬
pected. I, for example, was a frequent member of the au¬
dience at the performances in the Cafe Savoy, and learned a
lot there towards appreciating Jewish folklore. But Franz,
after the first time I took him there, entered into the atmos¬
phere completely. It was the same intense and creatively
fruitful dogged determination with which he himself did
everything. A curious kind of shy love and veneration bound
him to one of the actresses, who is hardly likely to have
noticed anything of it,1 and he treated the actor Lowy as a
1 In his literary plans he writes in his diary, “Love of an Actress,” and
several dreams about the theater.
110
friend, often took him back home with him—to the intense
annoyance of his father, who never could get on with any of
Franz’s friends—made this passionate person tell him all
about his life, his surroundings and his development, and
gained deep insight into the customs and spiritual crises of
the Polish-Russian Jews. His diary makes it clear what he got
from Lowy; in this way, too, Kafka was brought to the study
of Jewish history (Graetz) and the study of the history of
Yiddish literature—in the French edition of Pines’ book.1
Long portions of the quarto copybooks contain extracts from
the latter book, followed by discussions, rich in ideas, on the
structure and peculiarity of the literatures of small nations.
In this way many a sidelight is thrown on the way in which
Kafka followed up the development of Czech literature in
every detail. The many-sidedness of Kafka’s interests is
shown by the fact that the extracts from Pines are followed
by extracts just as full from Biedermann’s Conversations with
Goethe. (It should be mentioned here that in later volumes
of the diary Kafka’s entries include excerpts from “The
Memoirs of Countess Thurheim,” “which have been my joy
for the last few days,” from “Memoirs of General Marcellin de
Marbot,” and from Paul Holzhausen’s “The Germans in Rus¬
sia in 1812.” Kafka preferred reading biographies and auto¬
biographies to anything else. The diaries of Grillparzer and
Hebbel, the letters of Fontane, were among his favorite
books, and he knew them much better than he knew these
writers’ fiction.)
Perhaps the following postcard may give some idea of the
enthusiasm and joy with which Kafka threw himself into this
world of the Polish Jewish folk-energy which was so new to
us:

Dear Max
We are in luck! They are doing Sulamith by Goldfaden.
1 Histoire de la UttSrature JudSo-Allemande, Paris, 1911, which was
later published in German too. In his diary Kafka writes he is reading
this history of literature “with such a thoroughness, speed, and pleas¬
ure as I have never done other books of this kind.”
Ill
With pleasure I am wasting a card to write you what you
have read already. I only hope you have written it to me too.

Franz began to write a kind of autobiography of Isak Lowy,

using the material the latter gave him, and giving a survey
of the Yiddish theater. The beginning of the book has sur¬
vived. Short as it is, it gives a good picture of the kind of
conversations the two used to hold, and in which I often
took part, and of the circle of interests which was busying
Kafka at the time, and which was able to show us the ques¬
tion of Jewry from a more living and colorful side than the
abstract theories of Zionism could. It was the time when I
first came into contact with Zionists and the Zionist outlook,
and I passed their influence on to my friend, influences which
came from the Prague club “Bar-Kochba,” and particularly
from the wonderful Hugo Bergmann. At first Kafka’s attitude
was one of rejection. 1, too, was not at first in agreement with
everything that was preached to me on this side—often in a
form all too fine and polished—and in the beginning used to
go to the tiny, not very inviting Cafe Savoy on Ziegen square,
where they gave the generally despised melodrama as a
direct protest against Zionistic academics. I zealously cham¬
pioned the thesis that however near to unconscious humor
and trash they might come, from the performances of these
actors more could be learned about the essence of Judaism
than from the philosophic deductions of Jews of the West
who were, it is true, striving to get to the people, but who
were at heart already estranged from them.
It was not until much later by the laborious accumulation
of knowledge that I learned how interdependent East and
West, Zion and Diaspora are. Kafka held out against these
views much longer than I did, in fact. Later when I had be¬
come a convinced Zionist and was vainly trying to convert
Kafka to recognizing the necessity of the Zionist policy-
while we were rowing on the Moldava—we often came to an
argument and once to the only quarrel we ever had, a short
and passing one. In my diary for January 18, 1913, for ex¬
ample, I find entered the record of a conversation with
112
Buber, Werfel, Kafka, Pick, Baum, and myself, which was
obviously on this theme, and on August 23,1913, there is this
entry: “Afternoon with Kafka. Bathing, rowing. Conversa¬
tion about feelings of community. Kafka says he has none,
because his strength just about suffices for himself alone.
Argument in the boat. My change of heart on this point. He
shows me Kierkegaard, and Beethoven’s letters.” In Decem¬
ber there is the little note that we had quarreled. But on De¬
cember 24 it was all right again: “Kafka talked about social
questions. In the Town Park.”
From then on Kafka gradually came distinctly nearer my
Zionist standpoint, and in the eventful days of 1918, 1919—
the founding of the Jewish National Committee, and of the
Jewish School, he stood by me with advice, interest, en¬
couragement, and loving agreement, his recognition of my
work was my greatest support—finally, by studying Hebrew
deeply, he left me far behind in this field too.
But I am anticipating. Let us go back again for a moment
to the poor Yiddish troupe from which we both of us received
the impulse which set us on to reach later stages of de¬
velopment which seem so far removed from it. Kafka was
unwearying in the service of these artists who were always
in need. According to his diary, he drew up a circular to all
the Zionist clubs in Bohemia to make a tour possible for this
company; he had it duplicated himself, too. In this affair he
revealed how much energy and activity slept pent up in him,
before eaming-his-living and marriage plans, etc. had quite
crippled him. On February 18,1912, he organized an evening
of recitations for Lowy in the banquet hall of the Jewish
council chamber, and the whole burden of getting everything
ready and the technical arrangements rested on him. He bore
it with a groan, and yet with grace, not without pride. The
speech with which Kafka opened the evening has been pre¬
served in my wife’s notes. It begins:
“Before the Polish Jews begin their lines, I want to tell you,
ladies and gentlemen, how very much more Yiddish you un¬
derstand than you think you do. I am not really afraid of the
effect that is waiting for each one of you this evening, but I
113
 do want it to be given free play as soon as it has deserved it.
But this can’t happen if some of you . .
That the Russian friend in “The Verdict” bears traces of the
actor Lowy is clear. And how deeply the heart is moved by
this beautiful sentence in the diary: “The pity we feel for
these actors who are so good, and earn nothing, and apart
from that receive nothing like enough gratitude and praise, is
really nothing but pity for the sad fate of so many noble
efforts, and above all of our own.” From Prague, after break¬
ing with his company, Lowy turned to Budapest. Among the
papers Kafka left behind I find Lowy’s letter from Vienna
dated 10/28/13. It runs, with its characteristic original spell¬
ing and grammar: “Think you, how deep am I sunk that even
with you I have lost touch. . . . And how I miss your letters?
I have now been tome [sic] away from everything for a long
time, no friends any more, no parents, no family . . . and the
dearest of all, Dr. Kafka, also lost. ... Of this loss I never
dreamed. . . . You were after all the only one what was so
good to me .. . the only one what spoke to my soul, the only
one what half understood me. And you I must also lose, I’m
sorry. .. . You mustn’t write to me, I’m sorry. You mustn’t be
good to me. Please don’t think I’m ‘mad,’ I am normal, cold
as death.” . . . Further on in the letter is the sad sentence:
“What have I to wait for? Another shot of morphine.” Franz’s
draft of an answer either to this or some other letter lies next
to it.

Dear Lowy
I was much more pleased you remembered me than one
might guess from the fact that I have taken so long in answer¬
ing. I am in great confusion, and work, without myself or
anyone else getting much out of it.
Anyhow, here is some good news for you. I’ve got en¬
gaged, and think I’ve done something good and necessary in
doing so, even if the world is of course so full of doubts that
nothing is safe from them.
That you are still in trouble, and can’t find a way out is
very sad. That you are staying so long in Hungary is strange,
114
but probably has its bad reasons. I imagine we were both
much more hopeful when we walked about Prague in the
evenings. Then I thought you must make good somehow,
and at one stroke too. Anyhow, I am not giving up hope for
you at all, let me tell you. You despair easily, but are easily
happy, too; remember that in your despair. Only look after
your health in preparation for better days. What you have
gone through seems bad enough, don’t make it worse by
damaging your health.
I’d like to hear more about you and your friends. Aren’t
you going to Karlsbad this time? All my best wishes.
Franz K.

I don’t know whether this letter reached Lowy and what

has happened to him. I wonder if he is still alive.
1911. End of August. Rejoicings, holidays! The journey to
Zurich. Then Fhielen, then Lugano. Everywhere the thing
that we are keenest on is bathing in the lake. They were days
of sunshine and every glorious thing in the wQrld. Our
friendship was growing more and more intimate at this time;
the working year that had just ended had brought us again
many a dizzy height, including moments of sympathetic
solicitude. Thus I find in my notes on March 13: “Kafka rang
up, because the light in his room was going on and off.” I
showed my love for my friend, too, by setting to music his
poem, “Little soul—thou leaping dancest,” to a simple melody
accompanied by variations on the piano. Here let me remark
that Kafka, as if to compensate for the remarkable gift he
had of musical speech, had no talent for pure music. I have
frequently noticed that many an author whose verse or prose
bears all the characteristics of good music in its rhythm and
dynamic, at the same time expends all his musical energy on
speech, so that no specific capacity is left for the world of
musical sounds. Kafka played no instrument. He once told
me he couldn’t tell the difference between The Merry Widow
and Tristan and Isolde. There is this amount of truth in these
words, that he never took much trouble to get to know the
higher music. And yet he was not without a natural feeling for
115
rhythm and tune. I often heard him sing Lowe s ballad,
“Count Eberstein,” to himself-it was his favorite piece.
I often used to drag him along to concerts until I gave it
up, when I found his reactions to them were of a purely vis¬
ual character. “Listening to music, by its nature, sets a wall
around me,” he writes in his diary after a Brahms concert,
“and the only lasting musical effect is that, shut in in this
way, I am anything but free.” There follow descriptions of
the singers, the public, some clergymen in a box; not a word
about the music. All the more receptive was Franz to plays
and recitations. How many evenings we spent together in
theaters, cabarets—and also in wine bars with pretty girls!
For the idea that Kafka was a kind of stylite or anchorite is
completely wrong. He asked not too little from life, but
rather too much, perfection in fact, or nothing—and the result
of that, of course, was that in later years he steered clear of
dalliance, looked at the erotic side of life only from the most
serious angle, and never told a dirty story or even stood for
one being told in his presence. That is to say, he never pro¬
tested against one; it simply would not have occurred to any¬
one to tell one in his presence. But in those young days this
strict way of thinking had not yet developed so markedly. I
remember his passion for a barmaid called Hansi, of whom
he once said that whole cavalry regiments had ridden on her
body. Franz was very unhappy while this affair lasted. You
can see that, too, in a photograph taken of him together with
Hansi, but in which he looks as if he would like to run away
the next moment. An entry in my diary runs: “Trocadero
wine bar. There he [Franz] is in love with a Germania from
the German postage stamps, chambre separee. But he is so
extraordinarily shy. When he says, ‘I’ll pay your rent for you,’
he laughs as if he meant it ironically.” Many of his letters
refer to this and similar contacts. These ambiguous and, one
may say, even in his opinion, in fact most of all in his opin¬
ion, unclean affairs with women have left many traces in his
three great novels and in other parts of his writings. I shall
quote here another postcard, from Spitzberg in the Bo¬
hemian Forest, and three letters, which bear witness to his
116
craving and unsatisfied feelings as far as the world of women
is concerned. (The book Franz mentions is my novel, “Nome-
pygge Castle,” 1908.)

(Postcard)
My dear Max
I am sitting under the roof of the veranda. In front of me
it is about to begin to rain. I’m protecting my feet by lifting
them up from the cold brick floor and putting them on a
rung of the table, and I am exposing only my hands as long as
I am writing. And I am writing to tell you I am very happy,
and that I should be glad if you were here, because there are
things in the woods that one could lie in the moss for years
and think about. Adieu, I shall be back soon.
Your Franz

(Notepaper headed “Assicurazioni Generali.”)

6/9/1908
Dear Max
Thank you. I am sure you forgive unhappy me for not hav¬
ing thanked you before, when you hear that Sunday morn¬
ing and early afternoon I was trying for a job in vain,
dreadfully in vain, of course, solely on account of my physi¬
cal appearance, and the rest of the afternoon I was sitting
with my grandfather, although from time to time affected by
the idle hours; and then in the evening let me admit I was
on the sofa near the bed of my dear H., while she twisted and
turned her boy’s body under her red blanket. In the evening
with the rest of them at the exhibition, in the night in a wine
bar, home at half-past five. That was where I first looked at
your book, for which I thank you again. I have read only a
little, the parts I knew already. What an uproar, a kind of
controlled uproar!
Your Franz

My dear Max
It’s half-past twelve in the night, that is to say, an unusual
time for writing letters, even on a night as hot as this. The
117
moths won’t even come to the light. After my light happy
days in the Bohemian Forest—the butterflies there fly as high
as the swallows do at home—I have now been in Prague four
days, and so helpless. Nobody can stand me, and I can stand
nobody, but the second is only a result of the first; only your
book, which I am now reading straight through, does me
good. It is a long time since I was so deep in misery without
any explanation for it. As long as I go on reading it I hold
tight on to it, even if it is in nowise intended to bring help to
the unhappy; but if I don’t do this, I have so urgently to go
and look for someone who will only just give me a friendly pat
that yesterday I went to a hotel with a whore. She is too old to
feel melancholy any more; but she is sad, even though she
doesn’t wonder at it, that one is not so loving with a whore as
one is with a mistress. I didn’t bring her any comfort, because
she didn’t bring me any.

Dearest Max
Not because it is in itself anything that must be said with¬
out delay, but because it is after all an answer to your ques¬
tion, for which our way yesterday (not really “yesterday”
because it’s quarter-past two in the morning) was not long
enough any more for me to find the right answer. You said
she loves me. Why did you say that? Was it a joke, or the
seriousness of over-sleepiness! She loves me, and it doesn’t
even occur to her to ask me whom I was with in Stechowitz,
what I am doing these days, why I can’t go for a picnic on a
weekday, and so on. Perhaps in the bar there wasn’t time
enough, but when we went on the excursion there was time
and everything else you want, and yet any answer was good
enough for her. But one can plausibly refute anything; yet
in the following case one can’t even attempt a refutation. In
D. I was terribly afraid of running into W., and told her so,
and then she immediately got afraid on my behalf of meet¬
ing W. That gives us a simple geometrical figure. Her atti¬
tude to me is the greatest friendliness, as incapable of de¬
veloping as anything you can think of, and as far from the
highest, as from the lowest love, because it’s something quite
118
different. Myself I naturally don’t need to obtrude into the
figure at all, if it is to remain clear. Now I have really earned
my sleep.
Your Franz

It is obvious that we often had a lot of other things, too, to

tell each other about our first experiences with women, and on
a few of these occasions Franz would sometimes remember
a relationship he had with a French governess, which hap¬
pened a long way back. He used to talk, too, about a woman
he once met in Zuckmantel. And I found a puzzling postcard
from Zuckmantel in my possession, from very early days: my
address is written on it by Franz. The writing under the
view of a walk through the forest is that of an entirely un¬
known woman. “This is a forest, in this forest one can be
happy. So come along here, then!” The signature is in short¬
hand, absolutely indecipherable. It is to this episode and an¬
other later one in Riva, in 1913—about the latter Franz pre¬
served an inviolable silence, he had vowed to the girl he
would do so—that this entry in the diary of the year 1916
refers: “I had never yet been intimate with a woman apart
from the time in Zuckmantel. And then again with the Swiss
girl in Riva. The first was a woman, and I was inexperienced;
the second was a child, and I was completely and utterly
bewildered.”
In Lugano we lived happily in the open air. Franz was a
master of that joy in nature that bestows life and as in a
dream marries earth to heaven. (Read again the lines he
wrote me when he came back from the Bohemian Forest.
“The butterflies there fly as high as the swallows do at
home.”) At the Hotel Belvedere au Lac (Lugano) and the
bathing-place near by, as well as on our long walks, we en¬
joyed our good idle days, in the evening on the terrace of
the hotel. We kept our diaries fervently; but this time not
keeping it secret from each other, but in communion. Out of
this came the plan for a novel in collaboration, “Richard and
Samuel,” in which we had a little good-natured laugh at each
other. With Kafka, when he was happy, nothing was carried
119
out without a touch of mischief, which was always, however,
combined with a great amount of affection. At that time we
worked out, besides, from our habit of keeping diaries, a
whole theory of how to enjoy life, or at least travel. I remem¬
ber going on a steamer on Lake Lucerne and pitying those
tourists who took “only” cameras with them, and obviously
had no idea of the higher art of recalling one’s travels
through the medium of diaries.
And there was yet another plan which came out of that
short but so endlessly significant journey—which took us to
Milan too, and from there, diverted through a cholera scare,
to Stresa and Paris—a plan that bordered on lunacy but
which was worked out by the two of us with determination
and continual new jests. We hit upon the idea of creating a
new type of guidebook. The series was to be called “On the
Cheap.” There were to be titles like “On the Cheap through
Switzerland,” “On the Cheap in Paris,” etc. Franz was un¬
tiring and took a childish pleasure in compiling, down to the
finest details, the principles of this type that was to make
millionaires of us and above all take us out of the hideous
routine of office work. I then wrote in all seriousness and put
our plans for “The Reform of Guidebooks” up to publishers.
Negotiations always broke down on the point that we re¬
fused to deliver up our precious secret without an enormous
advance.
Franz took special delight and displayed a high degree of
virtuosity in balancing in this way on the line between
seriousness and the comic. It was often impossible to tell
whether he meant what he said seriously or as a joke: he
himself didn’t always know, I am sure, but simply sur¬
rendered himself to the creative imagination of a great teller
of fairy stories. Just so, with me too, he played this game of
our new Baedeker—our “On the Cheap,” which we could see
already posted up on the walls of the Paris metro alongside
Byrrh and the other most widely advertised aperitifs. Well,
“On the Cheap” was above all to save tourists from having to
choose, so that it needed imperative routes, only one hotel
in each town, only one means of travel, the one that gave the
120
best value for money. There was to be an organization to
check our information frequently. “Exact amount of tips,”
Kafka writes in the memorandum we wrote together. And a
note saying, “Neither tourists that want to go too fast or too
slow, but a certain in-between class. Departures from plan
are easier to arrange because they can be linked on to some¬
thing precise.” “On the Cheap” was also to devote a separate
chapter to each of the following questions: what to do on a
rainy day; travel souvenirs; what to wear; free concerts;
where and how does one get free tickets for the theater, like
a native of the place; in picture galleries see only a few im¬
portant pictures, but study these thoroughly. We got par¬
ticular fun out of an “On the Cheap” guide to conversation,
which worked out on this principle: “It is impossible to learn
a foreign language properly. We therefore prefer to teach it
you badly straightway. This gives you less trouble, and is
quite enough for making yourself understood. It is a kind of
Esperanto, bad French or bad English, invented by us. In
addition, we give dialects and the language of signs in cur¬
rent use locally.” All the plans we developed with so much
fun and friendship and at which we laughed ourselves sick,
contained of course an undercurrent of irony, which was
directed against our own shortcomings—we neither of us had
any talent for languages—and against the economies we were
unfortunately compelled by circumstances to make.
To cast a faint shadow on those days, which perhaps shine
all too brightly in my memory, I shall be conscientious and
quote another passage from my diary: “What a thought, that
Plato several times tried to put his teachings into practice
(Sicily). What on earth can have been going on in him and
round about him? The very sound of reasonableness which
one associates with the name of Plato doesn’t fit in with this
undoubtedly lunatic reality. And must not his contempo¬
raries lawfully have looked upon such a man, who after all
was wrong on so many points, as a fool and a nuisance? Pos¬
terity suffers less, or not at all, from his extremes, and so the
‘Ideal’ in him shines clearly forth—but we forget that these
extremes and this ideal are part and parcel of one another. If
121
I may be absolutely honest, didn’t I find Kafka a nuisance
now and then? For instance, in Lugano, when he refused to
take any laxative, faithful to his nature principles, but ruined
the days for me with his moanings? At the same time Kafka
was an exception among geniuses, he was so indescribably
gentle and considerate. He went to personal trouble to damp
down until they were completely unfelt the dissonances
which had their root in the principle of genius. They were
also really hardly noticeable, nothing but rudiments of them,
e.g. unpunctuality.”
For the journey to Weimar in the following year, 1912, we
were especially well prepared by our love of Goethe, and
the study we had been making of Goethe’s works for years.
To hear Kafka talk about Goethe with awe was something
quite out of the ordinary, it was like hearing a little child
talk about an ancestor who lived in happier, purer days and
in direct contact with the Divine. And now again let me
sound the little note of mischief at once: Kafka sometimes
emphasized that he was amazed that some authors are so in¬
cautious as to quote Goethe—a sentence from Goethe, after
all, cannot fail to stand out all too dazzlingly from the rest of
the prose of any author. To the unusual reverence Kafka felt
for Goethe the following passage from his diary bears wit¬
ness. “Goethe by the power of his writings probably retards
the development of the German language. Even if prose has
often traveled away from him in the intervening period, yet
it has always, as it is doing just at this moment, finally re¬
turned to him with increased longing, and has even taken
to itself archaic turns of speech which are to be found in
Goethe, but otherwise have nothing to do with him, in order
to enjoy the completest picture of their unbounded depend¬
ence on him.” I am putting alongside it another passage on
one of Lessing’s characters which will at least suggest the
outline of the whole complexity of Kafka’s position with re¬
gard to the German classics. On Tellheim in Minna von Barn-
helm, he quotes Dilthey: “He has that free movement of the
life of the soul which, as the circumstances of life change,
122
 takes us by surprise again and again by showing us quite
new aspects that only the creations of true poets possess.”
In this mood of reverential gratitude we paid our first and
last visit to Weimar. Kafka’s diary covering this most impor¬
tant journey I have now published. To complete the picture I
shall here repeat the appropriate passages from my Kingdom
of Love, making only one correction. That is, that we two
poor lower-grade civil servants had not one whole month,
but only a little over one week to spare for Weimar.
“They go for their summer holidays together. Only to Wei¬
mar, just one month in Weimar; from the very first they had
been one in their reverence for the primeval force of Goethe,
and both of them were quite uninfluenced by the fashionable
pooh-poohing of his greatness. In this case there was no need
for any mutual influence, the only result was perhaps a
strengthening of their feelings. Moreover, they have no wish
to do any such thing as study Weimar, but they live there
just as in any summer resort, bathe every day in the town
swimming-pool, in the evening eat dishful after dishful of
good strawberries in a restaurant in the Town Square; above
all, they intend to have a good rest. But as with everything
that touches Garta, this stay in Weimar also takes on a spe¬
cial shape—at the same time without Garta’s wishing it, only
from the fundamental characteristics of his nature, a special
honesty and accuracy (not of the head but of the heart).
You see, a tiny, ever so tender relationship springs up be¬
tween him and the lovely daughter of the caretaker at
Goethe’s house in the Frauenplan. To call it a love affair
would be saying too much; it is nothing but a shy, teasing,
perhaps also gently painful, pleasure in seeing each other on
the part of the two young people. The result of it is that
Garta, and Christof with him, are asked in to the caretaker’s
flat, that they can go in and out of Goethe’s flat as though
they were at home; that they have the entry into the garden,
which is otherwise out of bounds, and can wander about in
Goethe’s rooms outside visiting hours, that is to say, undis¬
turbed by the trampling of tourists. They feel as if they be¬
longed even, in the most distant, ancient Roman sense, to
123
Goethe’s ‘family.’ Like a ghost, something of Goethe’s music
echoes through their merry meetings with the caretaker’s
daughter, on these summer evenings crowned with green
and ringed with roses in his garden with its ancient ivy-
covered walls. He is there, the kingly old man; he is invisibly
there! Of all the sights of Weimar, even of those which have
to do with Goethe, they see very little else. Garta’s experi¬
ences are always full of gaps; it is only single things he
grasps always, but these with loving penetration to their
very depth, but there is never any question of completeness.
This also could easily be turned into stereotyped praise: the
intensive life that does not wish to record impressions. But
Garta does not consider it an advantage, but only as a per¬
sonal weakness, as a defect, that his capacities are insufficient
for a complete comprehension, and when he finds a man who
has this complete grasp of experience, or thinks he can pre¬
suppose in him a forceful striving to achieve it, he admires
him beyond measure. From many things he said one can see
that he took Christof for a first-class man of this kind—per¬
haps not altogether correctly. Anyway, they supplement one
another in the most salutary fashion. It hurts them a little
when they have to part after the days they spent together in
Weimar—Christof to go home, Richard to go back again to a
home for nature treatment in the Harz Mountains. They go
together by train a little way. At the junction where their
lines part, Christof in a sudden wave of affection embraces
his friend and kisses him—just this once—lightly on the
cheek. When they both get home, not a day passes without
their speaking at least for a fleeting moment. Many weeks
they spend, afternoon after afternoon, at the good old
Prague ‘Zivil’ swimming-baths, lying on the burning boards
under the autumn chestnut trees, or in the Vltava which has
already grown cooler. Worries about work, families, first
meetings with girls—everything they confide in one another.”
The journey to Weimar was also important for the reason
that it took us through Leipzig, where I brought Franz to¬
gether with Ernst Rowohlt and Kurt Wolff, who were then
running the publishing house of Rowohlt. For I had long
124
cherished the burning desire to see a book of my friend’s in
print.
Franz’s attitude towards this wish of mine was very di¬
vided. He wanted to—and again he didn’t want to. At times
his disinclination won the day, particularly at the time when,
having returned to Prague, he had to set to work and choose
those short pieces of prose which he considered were ready
to be printed out of the wealth of his manuscripts, that is to
say, the diaries, and give them the final polishing up—which
took place not without a lot of hesitation, looking-up of dic¬
tionaries, and despair at his uncertainty of the rules of spell¬
ing and punctuation. The publishers had already expressed
their readiness—these were happy days!—after seeing the
specimens I had taken with me to Leipzig. It was only up to
Franz to submit a definite manuscript. And that was just the
point at which he began to kick good and proper, and dis¬
covered that everything he had written was bad, and that
piecing together these “worthless” old fragments prevented
him from getting on and producing better work. But I
wouldn’t let up any more. Kafka’s diary is a witness to the
resistance he put up against me, but it didn’t help him in the
least. The book had to be finished, and finished it was. When
the amount of material chosen by Franz as worthy of publi¬
cation turned out to be incredibly small, the publishers de¬
cided to have the “Contemplation”—that was the title of the
book—set in unusually large type. The first edition, now very
rare, consisted of eight hundred numbered copies, and the
ninety-nine pages with their gigantic lettering resemble an¬
cient votive tablets. And thereby, by one of those rare acci¬
dents which according to Schopenhauer have nothing acci¬
dental left in them, the innermost character of this great
prose was after all unsurpassably brought out.
Thus Franz’s resistance was overcome, and turned to a
healthy purpose by good forces which in those legendary
days at least maintained an equilibrium with the bad forces
of the world. Here I must insert the remark that Kafka had
led me a similar dance the year before. I insisted on carrying
out the plan we had made in Lugano to write Richard and
125
Samuel.” We began; the work soon came to a standstill. I
wouldn’t give in, however, until at least a respectable slice
of the book had been written. A part of it then appeared in
the Herderhlatter published by Willy Haas. The continu¬
ation was to show that the course of friendship was exposed
to the same ups and downs and complications as that of true
love. The two friends were to get really angry with one an¬
other on the journey, their incompatibilities were to come
into the open, and only the danger of cholera they shared in
sultry, torrid Milan—where I moved Franz almost to tears by
begging him not to let me be buried without putting a bullet
into me, should I die there away from home—was to fan the
ashes of their old feeling for each other to its highest glory.
“The journey ends in the two friends putting their forces to¬
gether to produce a new work of art with a character of its
own,” says the preface to the published chapter. The two
friends were not, of course, drawn true to nature, above all
not Samuel, who was intended to be practical, rich, and in¬
dependent—yet we got a great deal of fun out of using for
Richard preferably Kafka’s characteristics and notes on the
journey, and mine for Samuel—although we sometimes fol¬
lowed the opposite procedure. But Franz struggled against
this work, too, and yet it is a good thing that I held his nose
to the grindstone for a while at least. He got used to regular
work, overcame internal inhibitions, forcibly tore himself
away from a period of sterility—it is just in the period in
which we were writing “Richard and Samuel” that his own
diary begins to flow more richly—he even occasionally, as an
exception, found some pleasure in the work on “Richard and
Samuel,” and the discipline he subjected himself to opened
up to him the idea that “the transformation of emotion into
character” which Schiller postulated was beginning to take
place in himself. Thus the quantity and quality of his produc¬
tion grew until the final break-through was achieved in the
night of September 22-23, 1912, when he wrote down the
whole of “The Verdict” at one sitting. In moving words Kafka
describes this night in his diary—I believe that this self¬
revelation Mull forever remain an important document for
126
the understanding of what a true artist is. “This is the only
way to write, only in a coherence like this, with such a com¬
plete flinging open of body and soul.” By saying this Franz
at the same time, without complaining, utters the severest
criticism of the pestilential necessity he found himself under
of earning his daily bread.
The redeeming moment that brought about this sudden
break-through was a visit paid to us by a girl from Berlin,
Miss F. B.—his relations with her were the guiding principle
in Franz’s life for five years. With the words, “When I went
to see Brod on August 13, she was sitting at the table,” the
diary begins the story of this fateful meeting, and then fol¬
lows the sentence, “As I was taking my seat, I took a good
look at her for the first time, and by the time I had sat down,
I had already formed an unshakable opinion.” This meeting
is also noted down in my diary for August 13, and in connec¬
tion with the note on the meeting in my parents’ house there
follows: “Cafe City. Kafka brings the finished book and it
pleases me immensely. Miss B. Then I read ‘Contemplation’
once again. Divine. Wednesday, August 14, sent ‘Contempla¬
tion’ to Rowohlt.”
The year 1912 is a decisive one in Kafka’s life. And two
important events took place on this same one day, August 13.
I have preserved a little note that Franz sent me by messen¬
ger the following morning. It shows, among other things,
that it would be wrong to picture me only in the role of the
one urging publication, and Kafka only in that of the one
striving against it. The letter runs, “Good morning, dear
Max. While I was arranging the pieces yesterday, I was com¬
pletely under the influence of the girl, as a result it is quite
possible that some stupidity has crept in, some sequence that
may strike one as comic only in secret. Please see if this is so,
and let me add my thanks for that, to all the great thanks I
owe you.” There follow two small directions for changes to
be made.
When I came back on September 29 from Portorose where
I had been working with my friend Felix Weltsch on the
book “Perception and Concept,” Franz came to the station to
127
meet us, and began at once telling us about the short story
“The Verdict” which he had just finished, and which he will¬
ingly gave me for my annual Arcadia. In this it duly appeared
—in the only year in which the publication itself appeared,
1913—with a dedication to his fiancee.
Immediately after “The Verdict,” Franz set to work on the
first chapter of his novel, which he had most probably begun
before, but which was only now getting into its stride. It was
“The Man Who Disappeared,” or Amerika. I shall quote my
diary notes from this period. September 29: “Kafka is in ec¬
stasy, writes whole nights through. A novel, set in America.
October 1: “Kafka in unbelievable ecstasy.” October 2:
“Kafka is still greatly inspired. One chapter finished. I am
happy about it.” October 3: “Kafka is doing well.” On October
6 he read me “The Verdict” and “The Stoker,” the first chap¬
ter of his novel Amerika. Immediately after that on October
8 took place the correspondence between his mother and my¬
self (concerning his contemplated suicide). On October 14
the great Vienna novelist, Otto Stoessl, for whom Kafka and I
had special admiration, was staying with me, and we went for
walks together, all three, in the streets of the Mala Strana of
Prague. But on October 28 there is already the foreboding
entry that Franz has written a twenty-two-page letter to
Miss F., and is troubled by worries about the future. That
was the beginning of the tragedy of their relations. (Franz’s
own diary reveals a gap from October 1912 till February
1913, which is why I am quoting my own diary just for this
period.) On November 3 I find: “Went to Baum’s where
Kafka read us the second chapter of his novel. He is com¬
pletely in love with F., and happy. This novel of his—an en¬
chantment.” And as early as November 24 of this unusually
rich end-of-year, Kafka read to us at Baum’s, “his glorious
short story about a noxious insect”—i.e. The Metamorphosis.
Thus between the end of September and the end of Novem¬
ber 1912, that is to say, within two months, three of Kafka’s
chief works came into being, or at least, as far as the novel is
concerned, had reached the decisive stage.
On “The Verdict,” this stormy tale of how the good and
128
dutiful son is, in spite of all that, found refractory and diaboli¬
cal by his father, and condemned to “death by drowning,”
whereupon he throws himself into the river with the cry,
“Dear parents, after all I have always loved you”—on this
story which at first sight seems quite clear from the psycho¬
analytical point of view, but which, when you take a second
and third look at it becomes more and more veiled in its
meaning, Franz himself has left three commentaries. One
was in a conversation with me. He told me, in fact, and to the
best of my recollection, more or less in so many words, “Do
you know what the last sentence means? When I wrote it, I
had in mind a violent ejaculation.” (Note.—It followed the
description of the suicide, and ran, “At this moment passed
over the bridge a truly unending stream of traffic.”) The
other two explanatory hints are to be found in the diary, and
were written while the story was being printed:
“2/11/1913.1 am taking advantage of the proof-reading of
‘The Verdict’ to jot down, as far as I can remember them
now, all the relationships that became clear to me during the
course of the story. This is necessary, because the story came
out of me like a real human birth, covered with dirt and
slime, and I am the only person that has the hand that can
reach the body itself, and that cares to do so. The friend is
the link between father and son, he is the greatest thing they
have in common. Sitting alone at his window, Georg takes a
sensual pleasure in rooting about in this common possession,
believes he has his father in himself and, but for a fleeting,
sad hesitation, considers that everything is peaceful. The
development of the story now shows how out of this com¬
mon thing, the friend, the father comes to the foreground,
and sets himself up as Georg’s opposite, strengthened by
other lesser common possessions, such as by the mother’s love
and devotion, by the loyal memory of her, and by the cus¬
tomers whom, it is true, the father originally cultivated for
the sake of his business. Georg has nothing, the fiancee who
lives in the story only through her relations with the friend,
i.e. with the common possession, and who just because there
has not yet been even a marriage, cannot enter into the blood-
129
bond that is drawn round the father and the son, is easily
driven away by the father. The whole of what they have in
common is built up on the father, Georg finds nothing in it
but what is foreign, what has come to be taken for granted,
something he has never sufficiently looked after, something
exposed to Russian revolutions, and it is merely because he
himself has nothing else left save the sight of his father, that
the verdict that shuts his father off from him completely has
such a powerful effect on him.
“Georg has the same number of letters as Franz. In Bende-
mann, the ‘mann’ is there only to strengthen the syllable
‘Bende’ [bonds] in case of any unforeseen possibilities in the
story. But Bende has the same number of letters as Kafka,
and the vowel V is repeated in the same positions as the
vowel ‘a’ in Kafka.
“Frieda has exactly the same number of letters as F. and
begins with the same letter; Brandenfeld begins with the
same letter as B. and, through Teld,’ has a certain connec¬
tion of meaning too. Possibly, too, the idea of Berlin was not
without influence, and the Brandenburg province may have
had something to do with it.
“February 12: While writing my description of the friend
abroad, I thought of St. a great deal. When I ran into him by
accident three months after this story, he told me he had got
engaged about three months before.
“After I had read my story out to them at Weltsch’s yester¬
day, the old man Weltsch went out of the room, and when he
came back after a little while praised particularly the de¬
scriptive passages in the story. Pointing with his hand, he
said, ‘I see this father in front of me’; and as he said so, he
was looking exclusively at the empty chair in which he had
been sitting while I was reading it.
“The sister said, ‘It’s our house.’ I was astonished at then-
getting the setting of the story so wrong, and said ‘Well, then
the father must have lived in the lavatory.’ ”
In January 1913 “Contemplation” appeared. The book is
dedicated “To M. B.” and in the copy that Franz gave me
these lines have been written in under the inscription: “Just as
130
it now stands here in print, for my dearest Max—Franz K.”
One year later I was able to return thanks by dedicating my
novel Tycho Brahes Redemption to him.
I wrote about his first book and about his literary work
in general in the only long essay on him that appeared dur¬
ing Franz’s lifetime, in the Neue Rwidschau, November
1921, and among other things said, “Where shall I begin?—
It doesn’t matter where. For among the peculiarities of this
phenomenon is that one can approach it from any angle
and reach the same conclusion.
“This already shows how true, how unshakably genuine,
how pure it is. For a lie offers a different aspect from every
angle, and what is impure is iridescent. But in the case of
Franz Kafka, and let it be said in his case alone in the
whole literary circle of the modems,’ there is no irides¬
cence, no changes of view, no scene-shifting. Here is truth,
and nothing but the truth.
“Take his language, for example. The cheap means, coin¬
ing new words, compounds, playing chess with the clauses,
he despised. ‘Despised’ is perhaps not the right word. They
are inaccessible to him, just as the impure is inaccessible to
the pure, is forbidden to it. His language is clear as crystal,
and on the surface one can, as it were, detect no other aim
than that of properly and clearly suiting the subject. And
yet underlying the serene mirror of this well of pure lan¬
guage are dreams and visions of unfathomable depth. One
peers into it and is enchanted by its beauty and individu¬
ality. But one cannot say, least of all at the first glance can
one say, wherein lies the peculiar quality of this simple sen¬
tence construction which is after all nothing except right,
healthy, and simple. Read a few sentences of Kafka aloud,
and your tongue and your1 breath will feel a sweetness
never experienced before. The cadences, the breaks, seem
to follow mysterious laws; the little pauses between phrases
have an architecture of their own, a melody is heard that
has its roots in other material than that of this earth. It is
perfection, simply perfection, that perfection of pure form
that brought Flaubert to tears in front of the mins of the
131
walls of the Acropolis. But it is perfection on the move, on
the march, at the double, even. I am thinking of things like
‘Children on the Post Road,’ which was the introductory
story in his first book, ‘Contemplation,’ this classically beauti¬
ful prose that nevertheless derives so completely from the cot¬
tage. There you have fire, the completely restless fire and
blood of a tense childhood, full of forebodings; but the walls
of fire obey the baton of an invisible conductor; they are not
ragged sheets of flame but a palace, whose every stone is a
roaring blaze. Perfection—and just for that reason not outre
and not extravagant. One turns somersaults only so long as
one has not reached the utmost limit, the line that embraces
the universe. The all-embracing does not need to turn somer¬
saults. But don’t things get dull at this level? This is the heart
of Kafka’s importance as an artist. I said before, he is perfec¬
tion on the move, on the road. Hence the all-embracing con¬
sorts without effort with the minutest, yes, the most scurrilous
detail. Oceanus with the comic tricks of the trade of office
life, the sweetness of redemption with a new lawyer, who is,
however, really the war-horse Bucephalus, or with a worried
country doctor, or a little commercial traveler, or with the
pink tinsel of a little equestrienne. Hence these great sen¬
tences full of artistry, and this simplicity of style, which is yet
shot through with ideas in every phrase, in every word.
Hence the inconspicuousness of the metaphors which never¬
theless—it is only some time after that one notices it with
surprise—say something new. Hence calm, perspective, free¬
dom, as if above the clouds—and yet good natural tears and
the compassionate heart. If the angels made jokes in heaven
it would have to be in Franz Kafka’s language. This language
is fire, but it leaves no soot behind. It has the sublimity of
endless space, and at the same time it palpitates with every
palpitation of things created.
“That the pure dare not touch the impure is its strength,
but also, at the same time, its weakness. Its strength, because
it means the perception, the full perception of the distance
between it itself and the absolute. But this distance is some¬
thing negative, is weakness. And so the strength of the pure
132
can only express itself by insisting that it will not try to lie
away its distance from the absolute, but rather exaggerate it
directly, as though through a spy-glass that magnifies a thou¬
sandfold. But that just to do this is strength, it may and dare
not admit, if it wishes to maintain its position. Thus there
results a double foundation and, as there always is where
there is a double foundation, humor. Yes, even in the midst
of the terror of such self-will, such persistence in the most
dangerous of all attitudes—for it is a question of life find
death in this case—there plays a loving smile. It is a new kind
of smile that distinguishes Kafka’s work, a smile close to the
ultimate things—a metaphysical smile so to speak—indeed
sometimes when he used to read out one of his tales for us
friends of his, it rose above a smile and we laughed aloud.
But we were soon quiet again. It is no laughter befitting
human beings. Only angels may laugh in this way, angels that
we certainly cannot picture in the likeness of Raphael’s cher¬
ubs—no, angels, seraphim with three great pairs of wings,
demonic beings between man and God.
“In a quite special way, then, strength and weakness, rise
and fall, interpenetrate in Kafka’s writings. At first sight it is
weakness that meets the eye—something that on the surface
puts one in mind of decadence, and satanism, of the love of
decay, death and horror that breaks out in Poe, in Villiers de
lisle Adam, and other later writers. But this first sight is en¬
tirely misleading. A short story like Kafka’s In the Penal
Colony has nothing whatever in common with Poe, although
scenes of horror occur in it along the same thematic line. A
comparison of the style, if nothing else, should teach one
that, or at least give one to think. What has the brightly col¬
ored narrative of Kafka, with its sure line, like a drawing by
Ingres, in common with the vibrating prose, sometimes in¬
deed violently set in vibration, of these specialists in making
one’s flesh creep? They are specialists in the deep-sea explora¬
tion of hells, having a more or less scientific interest in then-
explorations; a little religious end-resolution, a kind of ‘moral
of the tale,’ is stuck on more or less out of embarrassment.
Writers, certainly great writers even, and honestly con-
founded—but don’t you hear throughout a note of being
‘proud of confusion’? But in Kafka’s case after all it is the
deep earnestness of a religious man that fills the scene. He
shows no curiosity about the abysses. It is against his ioill
that he sees them. He does not lust after decay. He falls into
decay, although he follows the narrow path, sees and loves
determination and coherence, and there is nothing he loves
so much as the blue unclouded heaven above him. But this
heaven begins to pucker like the forehead of a scowling
father. And as much more terrible and more shudderingly
gruesome the fear for keeping heaven unclouded is than
making a study of a tolerable couple of hell’s abnormities and
turning them into capital, so much more powerful is the
shattering effect of Kafka’s polished work of art than the
sensations to be got from those sketch-books of ‘interesting’
pathology of the ‘uncanny’ type.
“That is exactly why his books—The Metamorphosis or
‘The Verdict,’ etc.—give the reader such a shudder. Because
all around them, and really in the midst of them, too, the
whole of the free world is revealed. But they are not ‘on prin¬
ciple meant to horrify’—but rather on a principle that is the
opposite of “horror-making’—on a principle that is perhaps
idyllic or heroic, in any case honest, healthy, positive, in¬
clined to everything that desires to live, everything gentle
and good, the blooming girlish body that shines over the
corpse of the hero at the end of The Metamorphosis, farm
labor, everything natural, simple and fresh with a child’s
freshness, full of striving after joy, happiness, decency, physi¬
cal and spiritual strength, on the principle then on which a
well-meaning God worked when He created the world—but
‘not for us.’ Against the background of a good Divine Will
this ‘only not for us’ has a doubly terrifying effect, as a con¬
fession of sin of the utmost possible force. It is not life that
Kafka rejects. He does not strive with God, only with him¬
self. Hence the dreadful severity with which he goes to law.
All through his writings there are judges’ chairs, sentences
are executed. The Metamorphosis—the man who is not per¬
fect, Kafka degrades to an animal, to an insect. Or, what is
134
still more horrible (‘A Report to an Academy’), he lets
the animal be raised to the level of a human being, but to
what a level of humanity, to a masquerade at which mankind
is unmasked. But even that is not enough! Mankind must sink
deeper still—it is a question only of ‘all or nothing’—and if a
man cannot raise himself to God’s level, if the Father has
found him guilty, if entire union with the fundamental moral¬
ity, entry into the ‘Law,’ is forbidden him by a hefty door¬
keeper, or rather when the man has not the courage to thrust
this doorkeeper on one side, when the ‘imperial messenger’
of the dying sun-prince never comes to you—very well, then
change yourself into some useless object that is neither ani¬
mate nor inanimate, into a reel of cotton, which as ‘something
in the care of the heavenly householder’ wanders upstairs
and downstairs without stopping. ‘What’s your name, then?’
—‘Odradek’—and a whole range of Slav words is set ringing,
which all mean renegade, renegade from one’s race, ‘rod,’
renegade from the council, ‘rada,’ the divine decision of the
creation, ‘rat.’ ‘And your address?’ ‘No fixed abode.’ From
this you can understand that Kafka writes, alongside the gen¬
eral tragedy of mankind, in particular the sufferings of his
own unhappy people, homeless, haunted Jewry, the mass
without form, without body, as no one else has ever done. He
writes it, without the word ‘Jew’ appearing in any one of his
books.”

In May 1913, appeared “The Stoker,” the first chapter of the

novel Amerika which was not published until after his death.
This time Franz put the whole thing through without any
assistance or urging on my part. I shall quote a letter of a
later date, which shows the unusual relations that existed be¬
tween Franz Kafka and his publisher Kurt Wolff, and which
do the author and the publisher equal personal honor. It may
also lay claim to be praised for having in itself the charm of
rarity. Kurt Wolff writes, November 3, 1921:

Dear and honored Mr. Kafka

Fourteen days ago I happened by accident to meet, in
135
Leipzig, Ludwig Hardt, who came from Prague, and traveled
in his company from Leipzig to Berlin. On this journey we
made together, Ludwig Hardt told me about the recitations
he had given in Prague, and about the special pleasure it had
given him to be in your company.
Talking to Ludwig Hardt gives me an opportunity of giv¬
ing you another proof that I am still alive. Our correspond¬
ence is rare and frugal. None of the authors with whom we
are connected comes to us with wishes or questions so seldom
as you do, and with none of them do we have the feeling that
the outward fate of their published books is a matter of such
indifference as it is with you. In this case it would seem to be
the right thing for the publisher to write and tell the author
from time to time that this lack of interest on the author’s part
in the fate of his books does not lead the publisher astray, and
make him lose his faith and trust in the special quality of
what he has published. From the bottom of my heart may I
assure you that I personally have so strong a feeling for you
and your work as I only have in the case of perhaps two or
at most three of the writers whom we represent, and whom
we are permitted to bring before the public.
You must not consider the outward results achieved by
your books as a measure of the work we put into selling them.
You and we know that it is generally just the best and most
valuable things that do not find their echo immediately, but
only much later, and we still have faith in German reading
circles that they will one day have the receptive capacity that
these books deserve.
It would be an especially great pleasure for me if you
would care to make it practically possible for us to demon¬
strate tangibly the unshaken confidence that unites us with
you and your work, by entrusting us with further manuscripts
for publication. Every manuscript that you can bring your¬
self to send us will be welcome, and will be published in book
form with love and care. If, in the course of time you could
once send us, together with collections of short prose pieces,
a long connected story or novel—I know, after all, from your¬
self and from Max Brod how many manuscripts of this kind
136
are nearly finished, or perhaps quite finished—we should wel¬
come it with special gratitude. It must also be taken into con¬
sideration that the public for a connected, comprehensive
prose work is naturally much greater than that for a collec¬
tion of short prose pieces. That is a banal and senseless atti¬
tude on the part of the reader, but there it is. The stir which
a longer prose work would make would at least enable us to
achieve incomparably greater sales than we have so far done,
and the success of a book of this kind would also make pos¬
sible a livelier trade in those already published.
Please, dear Mr. Kafka, give us the pleasure of letting us
know if and what we may hope for in the near future.
I hope your health is again passable, and greet you with
unchanged feelings, as your honestly and heartily devoted
Kurt Wolff

Despite encouragement of this kind Franz could not bring

himself to finish even one of his three long novels. Of the way
he planned to finish the novel Amerika—which I am dealing
with here, because the first two chapters of it were written
still in the period which falls before the publication of
“Contemplation”—I remember that it was to be the sole work
of Kafka that was to end on an optimistic note, with wide-
ranging prospects of life. On the other hand Franz seems at
other times to have pictured a different, tragic end for his
hero, Karl Rossman. This we see from a note in his diary,
dated September 29, 1915, in which he compares his two
novels “The Man Who Disappeared” (Amerika) and The
Trial, of which the hero is called K. “Rossman and K., the in¬
nocent and the guilty, finally without distinction destroyed
by legal sentence, the innocent man with a fighter hand, more
pushed to the side than hurled to the ground.”
The novel Amerika is kept with a fighter hand, in brighter
colors, and with more joy in hopes than the two later long
books. On this book, too, there is to be found a short com¬
mentary, a self-portrayal in the diary. I quote the following
fines also because in them is clearly revealed the great dis¬
cretion with which Kafka combines admiration for Dickens
137
with keen criticism of him. Just through a direct insight of
this kind one gets perhaps an inkling of the wealth and the
surety of judgment one met with in the company of a man
who, with all his devotion to the unfathomable, remained
sober and aloof from excursions into the temptations of cheap
mysticism, who never allowed himself to be so blinded by the
good qualities of a man or a writer as to fail to see the bad
side, and for whom, on the other hand, openly displayed
vices and failings in any phenomenon never distracted his
attention from a just appreciation of the virtues it possessed
at the same time. As clearly, truly, and complicatedly as he
here evaluates Dickens, Kafka looked at the whole world.
The page in the diary runs: “Dickens’ Copperfield. ‘The
Stoker’ a sheer imitation of Dickens, the novel I have
planned even more so. The story of the trunk, the happiness¬
spreading and charming hero, the menial tasks, the loved one
on the country estate, the dirty houses, and so on. Above all,
the method. It was my intention, I now see, to write a
Dickens novel, only enriched by the sharper lights I have
taken from my period, and the duller ones which I dug out
of myself. Dickens’ wealth and carelessly powerful sweep,
but in consequence passages of horrible powerlessness, in
which the only thing he does is to muddle up together what
he has already achieved. Barbaric is the effect of the senseless
whole, a barbarism which I, thanks to my weaknesses and
taught by my epigonism, have at least avoided. There is
heartlessness behind this manner overflowing with emotion,
these rude, rough characterizations which are artificially in¬
jected into every person, and without which Dickens would
be unable to scramble up his stories even for a fleeting mo¬
ment.”

138
 CHAPTER V

THE ENGAGEMENT

FRANZ KAFKA had the highest conception of marriage. In

the “Letter to My Father,” he writes about it in these terms:
“To get married, to found a family, to accept all the children
that arrive, to maintain them in this uncertain world, and
even to lead them a little on their way is, in my opinion, the
utmost that a man can ever succeed in doing. That so many
people succeed with apparent ease in doing it is no proof to
the contrary, because, in the first place, not many really suc¬
ceed; and secondly, these ‘not many’ don’t generally ‘do’ it,
but it just ‘happens’ to them. This is not that utmost that I
mean, it is true, but it is nevertheless a very good thing and
worthy of all respect—particularly as ‘doing’ and ‘happening’
cannot be separated absolutely one from the other. And
finally there is no question at all of this utmost, but only of
some kind of distant, but respectable approach to it; after all,
it is not necessary to fly right into the middle of the sun, but
just to crawl to some clean spot on the earth on which the sun
sometimes shines and where one can warm oneself a little.”
Similarly in a story like “Eleven Sons” this high esteem
for the family, one may even say for the patriarchal way of
life, such as Franz so admired as the natural attitude of his
father, stands out clearly. The enormous joy of a father who
tells everybody in the house that a grandson has been born
to him, is described in the diary with that mixture of aston¬
ishment, deep approval, and light, critical mockery which
characterizes the relations between son and father in “The
Verdict.” The prose piece “Eleven Sons,” which has already
challenged several forced explanations of its meaning is,
in my opinion, to be understood as a wishful picture of
fatherhood, of founding a family, which can be held up
against the father’s example as something of equal value, that
is to say, something just as magnificent and patriarchal, some-
139
thing bordering on the mystic in all the simplicity of its life.
This explanation is not contradicted by the fact that Franz
once said to me, “The eleven sons are quite simply eleven
stories I am working on this very moment.” After all, stories
were his children. In his writing he was accomplishing, on a
remote territory, but independently, something which was
analogous to his father’s creative power—I am following
Franz’s conception of this point, not my own—and which
could be set alongside it. The ideal that hovered before his
eyes when once he was reading “with suppressed sobs” a
book on the war of 1870-71 was “to be a father, and talk qui¬
etly with one’s son. But then one may not have a little toy
hammer in place of a heart.”
After all that, one may well understand how the meeting
with the girl who for the first time awakened in him the desire
to get married stirred him to the very depths of his being. He
got to know F. in August 1912. As early as November 9,1912,
we find in the papers he left behind him the draft of a letter;
I do not know whether the letter corresponding to it was ever
posted, but it at least reflects sharply enough his first mood
of fear and retreat.

Dearest Fraulein
You mustn’t write to me any more, and I, too, shall not
write to you any more. I could not help but make you un¬
happy by my writing, and I myself am past all help. To admit
that to myself, I didn’t really need to count the chimes each
hour all last night, I was fully aware of it in fact before my
first letter, and if in spite of that I tried to cling to you, I
should deserve to be cursed for it anyway, if I were not
cursed for it already. If you want your letters back I shall of
course send you them, much as I should like to keep them.
But if you do really want them after all, write me a postcard
with nothing on it as a sign that you do. Quickly forget the
ghost that is me and live in happiness and peace as you did
before.

Despite this letter, or draft of a letter, the correspondence

140
between Prague and Berlin went back and forth with great
liveliness. Things hung in the balance for a long time. The
girl began to have doubts, Franz seemed to her—and one
cannot hold it against her—uncanny and impossible to fit into
the ordinary course of affairs. She wanted to break it off.
That made him redouble his efforts to keep her. When no
news came he was miserable. When news came he tormented
himself with doubts. How was he going to manage to live in
a menage of two? At the same time he experienced then an
epoch of the highest literary productivity. Immediately after
“The Verdict,” in addition to the works which were published
later, he began a story, the chief character of which was
called Gustav Bleukelt, the tale of “a simple man of regular
habits,” who dies at the age of thirty-five. “Kept myself from
writing by force,” he writes twice following in his diary. And,
“the rush of blood to the head and this useless drifting past!
What harmful things.” At Baum’s he read “The Verdict” to
us and had tears in his eyes. “The indubitability of the story is
confirmed.” Those are strong words of self-conviction, rare
enough in the case of Franz. In May 1913 he attempted to
counterbalance his mounting emotions by garden work. On
July 1 he was seized by “the wish for solitude undisturbed by
thought. To have only myself to face. Perhaps I shall find it
in Riva.” But on July 3 again we find, “the extension and
heightening of existence through marriage. Text for a ser¬
mon. But I can guess it almost.” On July 21 he draws up for
himself a list of all the points “for and against my marriage.”
The deeply affecting document closes with the appeal in
large letters: “Miserable me!” and “What misery.” It lists the
following points:
“1. Inability to bear living alone, not any inability to live,
quite the contrary; it is even unlikely that I understand how
to live together with someone; but to bear the onslaught of
my own life, the onset of time and old age, the vague pressure
of the itch to write, my sleeplessness, the near approach of
madness—I am unable to bear all this alone. Perhaps I should
fit in naturally. My connection with F. will lend my existence
greater powers of resistance.
141
 “2. Everything immediately starts me thinking. Every joke
in the comic papers; every memory of Flaubert and Grill-
parzer; the sight of the nightshirts laid out on my parents
twin beds made for the night; Max’s marriage. Yesterday
N. N. said, ‘All the married men (among our friends) are
happy, I don’t understand it’—when he said this, it also
started me thinking and I became frightened again.
“3. I must be alone a great deal. All that I have accom¬
plished is the result of being alone.
“4. Everything that is not connected with literature I hate;
it bores me to carry on conversations (even when they are
concerned with literature); it bores me to pay calls, the joys
and sorrows of my relatives bore me to the very soul. Con¬
versation takes the importance, the seriousness and the truth
out of everything, I think.
“5. Fear of being tied to anyone, of overflowing into
another personality. Then I shall never be alone any more.
“6. In front of my sisters, this was especially so in my
earlier days, I was often a quite different person than with
other people. I laid myself open, was fearless, strong, un¬
expected, carried away, as I otherwise am only when I am
writing. If I could only be these things before all the world
through the intermediation of my wife! But wouldn’t it in
that case be at the expense of my writing? Only not that! Not
that!
“7. Single, I might perhaps one day really give up my job.
Married, it would never be possible.”
On August 13 he made the note, “Perhaps it is now all over,
and my letter of yesterday [i.e. to F.] may be the last. That
would undoubtedly be the right thing. What I am suffering,
what she will suffer—it’s nothing to compare with the mutual
suffering that would result. I shall slowly pull myself to¬
gether; she will get married, it is the only way out for mortals.
We two cannot blast a road through the rocks for our two
selves, it is enough that we have wept and tormented our¬
selves for a whole year trying to do so. She will see that from
my last letters. If she doesn’t, then I shall certainly have to
marry her because I am too weak to stand up against what
142
she thinks about our mutual happiness, and quite unable
not to put into practice, as far as in me lies, what she con¬
siders possible.”
But the affair developed along different lines. On August
14: “The opposite has happened. Three letters came. The last
I couldn’t resist. I love her, as far as I am capable of that, but
my love is buried almost to suffocation under fear and self-
reproaches.” On August 18, during a long walk, he told me
he had proposed to F. I had gone and fetched him at the
nursery garden in Troja, and then he had given me some very
worldly-wise, positive advice to help me to get rid of the
worries which were piling up on me at that time. Finally,
with less assuredness this time, he began to talk about his
own affairs. I made this entry about our conversation in my
diary: “Franz on the subject of his marriage. He has pro¬
posed. His unhappiness. Everything or nothing. His justifica¬
tion, pure emotion, without analysis, without the possibility
or need for analysis. A complicated situation, which engages
my deepest attention. He talks of Radeschowitz1 where the
married women are bursting with sexuality, with children,
the unborn too, who rule everything. He counsels complete
retirement from the world.” The same mood of despair ex¬
presses itself in entries in his own diary. For example, on
August 15: “Tormented in bed towards the morning. The
only solution I can see is to jump through the window.
Mother came to my bed and asked if I had sent the letter 2
off, and if I had stuck to the same wording. I said the wording
was the same, only still sharper. I said she didn’t understand
me in any case, and not only in this affair. Later she asked me
if I was going to write to Uncle Alfred—he deserved to be
written to. I asked her how he deserved it. He has wired, he
has written, he means so well by you. ‘Those are only out¬
ward things,’ I said, Tie is a complete stranger to me, he mis¬
understands me utterly, and has no idea of what I want and
need, I have nothing to do with him.’ ‘Well then, nobody
understands you,’ said mother. ‘I suppose I am also a stranger
1A summer house near Prague.
2 To F.'s parents.
143
 to you, and so is your father. We all wish nothing but your
harm/ ‘Certainly, you are all strangers to me, it’s only blood
that connects us, but that doesn’t express itself. You don’t
wish me any harm, of course.’
“From this and a few other observations of myself, I am
led to the conclusion that in my ever-increasing inward de¬
termination and confidence there he possibilities that I could
after all stand the test of marriage, and even guide it towards
a development favorable to my vocation. It is however a be¬
lief I have clutched at, in a certain sense, standing on the
window ledge.
“I shall shut myself up away from everything until I have
lost all recollection. I shall set myself at enmity with every¬
body, speak to nobody.”
He was reading a Kierkegaard anthology, “The Book of
the Judge.” The similarity between Kierkegaard’s fate and his
own becomes clear to him.
In September 1913 he took refuge in Riva, at the Hartun-
gen nursing home. “The very idea of a honeymoon fills me
with horror,” he writes to me. He experiences the curious
episode with the Swiss girl. It remains obscure. “Everything
struggles against its being set on paper. Were I sure that her
command not to say anything about it had any influence on
this—I have obeyed her command strictly, almost without
effort—I should be satisfied.” Then later the words, “Too late!
The sweetness of mourning and of love. To be smiled at by
her in a boat. That was the most beautiful thing of all. Always
the longing to die and yet keeping oneself alive, that alone is
love.”
In November “an ambassador from F.” appeared in
Prague, a girl friend who later played a role in this relation¬
ship which is not quite transparent. In the most tactless way
I was plaguing him just at this time with my project for an
“Education in Communality,” in Zionism. It is die only small
cloud on our friendship, which I have already mentioned.
“The day before yesterday in the evening with Max. He be¬
comes more and more of a stranger; he was often that to me,
now I am becoming it to him too.” And a little later comes the
144
outcry—later recanted by word and deed—“What have I in
common with Jews? I have almost nothing in common with
myself, and should hide myself quietly in a comer satisfied
with the fact that I can breathe.” His diary swarms with
dreams, beginnings of short stories, sketches. Everything
seems to be caught up in a tremendous fermentation. And
among them we find this important note, which makes clear
one root of his spiritual housekeeping and economy, directing
him away from the over-indulgence in self-analysis, which
was also sapping his marriage plans, towards the realm of
story-telling and of fiction: “Hatred of active self-observation,
explanations of one’s state of mind, such as: Yesterday I was
so, and the reason was such; today I am so, and the reason is
such. It is not true, the reason was not such, and the reason is
not such, and therefore also not so, and so. Conduct yourself
with calm, without being hasty, and live as you must, and do
not chase round after your own tail like a dog.”
In the following year, 1914, a crisis broke out in his rela¬
tions with F. She wanted to have nothing to do with him. On
the fifth of April he entered in his diary, “If it were only pos¬
sible to go to Berlin, to become independent, to five from day
to day, even to go hungry, but to let one’s whole strength
gush forth, instead of conserving it here, or rather turning
oneself away towards nothingness! If only F. wanted it, if she
would stand by me!” He wanted to live in Berlin as a journal¬
ist, as a freelance. At the end of May or the beginning of
June—I cannot make our dates agree—the official engage¬
ment took place in Berlin. A flat was taken in Prague. The
engagement, which took place under the most unfavorable
auspices (“I was bound like a criminal, etc.), was followed,
at the end of July, by the break, which also took place in
Berlin. “The court of law in a hotel,” he writes about it. It
was, so he told me, the hotel “Askanischen Hof” near the
Anhalter station. Present at the decisive talk was not only F.
but also her girl friend. Then the scene with his parents.
“Solitary tears on my mother’s part. I told the whole story.
Father understood it rightly from every side. Came in fact
from Malmo for my sake. Traveled overnight. Sat in his shirt-
145
sleeves. They admit I am in the right, there is nothing, or at
least not much that can be said against me. Diabolical in all
innocence.”
I believe I am not going wrong when I look in those ter¬
rible upheavals, during which Kafka was always troubling
his own conscience with questions (“To have to bear and to
be the cause of such suffering,” he laments in his diary), for
the origin of two new long works which were written after
the breaking-off of the engagement. In September he read
aloud to me the first chapter of the novel The Trial, and in
November, In the Penal Colony. They are documents of liter¬
ary self-punishment, imaginative rites of atonement. What K.,
the hero of The Trial, had done is never said. By ordinary
civil standards he is undoubtedly innocent. There is “noth¬
ing, or at least not much that can be said against him.”
And yet he is “diabolical in all his innocence.” Somehow or
other he has not lived up to the laws of the good life. He is
called to account by a mysterious court, and finally the sen¬
tence on him is carried out. “On the eve of his thirty-first
birthday,” says the last chapter. As a matter of fact Kafka,
when he began his novel, was thirty-one. There is a girl who
appears in the book several times, Fraulein Biirstner—in his
manuscript Kafka generally writes this characters name
abbreviated to Fr. B., or F. B., and then the connection is
surely quite clear. At the end, K. is still trying to keep the
bailiffs off. “Then in front of them, from a little alley that lay
deep in the shadows, up a short flight of steps, Fraulein
Biirstner came out into the square. It was not quite certain
that it was she, the resemblance was certainly great. Whether
it was really Fraulein Biirstner or not, however, did not mat¬
ter to K.; the important thing was that he suddenly realized
the futility of resistance.” It is really of no importance
whether the apparition is Fraulein Biirstner or is only like
her. The whole failure of his attempt to get married, indeed,
was important for the life of Kafka, as will soon become clear,
as a pattern, and not individually—independent of the person
of his fiancee—or rather as a pattern that, as the last year of
his life shows, could be broken through by the personality of
a woman of unusual character.
146
 About a journey he made to the Danish seaside place on
the Baltic, Marienlyst, in the company of a writer whom he
esteemed very highly, Ernst Weiss (who seems to have
played a certain part, by his advice, in the happenings in
Berlin), he drafted a revealing letter to his parents, revealing
also because it shows that there were periods when Kafka
had counted on the possibility of earning a living by his liter¬
ary work. In this letter, among other things, he writes:

I have not finished with Berlin, however, in so far as I be¬

lieve that the whole business, for your good and for mine (for
they are certainly one and the same thing) prevents me from
going on living as I have done. Look, really serious pain I
have probably never caused you till now, unless it were that
this breaking-off of my engagement is one, at this distance I
can’t judge it as such. But really lasting pleasure I have given
you still less, and that, believe me, solely for the reason that I
couldn’t give myself this pleasure continuously. Why that is
so, just you, Father, although you cannot recognize the real
thing I want, will understand the easiest! You sometimes re¬
late how badly things went with you when you were making
your first beginnings. Don’t you think it is a good training for
self-respect and satisfaction? Don’t you think—anyway you
have already told me so in so many words—that I have had
things too easy? So far I have grown up in complete depend¬
ence and outward well-being. Don’t you think that that was
not at all a good thing for a nature like mine, kind and loving
as it was on the part of all who saw to it that it was so? Of
course there are men who know how to ensure their independ¬
ence anywhere, but I am not one of them. You must admit
that there are also people who never lose their dependence,
but to put it to the test as to whether I don’t perhaps belong
to that class, seems to me an attempt which must be made.
Even the objection that I am too old for such an attempt
doesn’t hold water. I am younger than would appear. The
only good result of dependence is that it keeps one young.
That of course only in the case that it comes to an end.
In the office I shall never be able to achieve this improve¬
ment. Not anywhere at all in Prague. Here everything is ar-
147
ranged to keep me, a man that fundamentally asks for de¬
pendence, in that state. Everything is so nicely laid to my
hand. The office I find very burdensome and often unbear¬
able, but at bottom, all the same, easy. In this easy way I earn
more than I need. What for? Whom for? I shall go up in the
scale of salaries. To what purpose? If this work doesn’t suit
me and doesn’t even bring me independence as a reward,
why should I not throw it up? I have nothing to risk, and
everything to gain if I hand in my resignation and go away
from Prague. I risk nothing, because my life in Prague leads
to nothing good. Sometimes you say for fun I am like Uncle
R. But my way of life will not lead me so far apart from his if
I stay in Prague. I shall presumably have more money, more
interests, and less faith than he has; I shall be correspond¬
ingly more dissatisfied, because other differences there will
hardly be. Away from Prague I can gain everything, that is
to say, become an independent man at peace with himself,
who is employing all his faculties, and as a reward for good
and genuine work gets the feeling of really being alive, and
of lasting contentment. A man like this—this will not be the
smallest gain—will also behave better towards you. You will
have a son whose every single action you will not perhaps
approve of, but in whom, as a whole, you will be well
pleased, because you will be obliged to say, ‘He does his
best.’ This feeling you have not now, and rightly.
The way to carry out my plan I imagine is this: I have
5,000 crowns. That enables me to live somewhere in Ger¬
many, in Berlin or in Munich, for two years, if needs must,
without earning anything. These two years will enable me
to go on with my literary work, and to produce from out of
myself that which I cannot produce in the same clarity,
wealth and coherence in Prague, what between inner leth¬
argy and outer disturbances. This literary work will enable
me, after these two years, to live, however modestly, on what
I earn myself. But let it be as modest as you like, it will be
incomparably better than the life which I am now leading in
Prague, and that which awaits me there in future. You will
object that I am mistaken in my abilities and in the possibility
148
of making a living out of these abilities. That’s certainly not
out of the question. Only the answer to that is that I am
thirty-one, and mistakes of that kind cannot be taken into
account at that age, otherwise it would make any accounting
impossible. A further answer to it is that I have already writ¬
ten a certain amount, little though it be, which has half suc¬
ceeded in meeting with recognition, but the objection is
finally answered by the fact that I am not in the least lazy,
and have fairly few pretensions, and therefore, even if this
hope should fail, can find other ways of earning my living,
and in any case should not make any claims on you; for that
would anyhow, both in its effects on me, as well as on you,
make things still worse than my present life in Prague is, in
fact it would be completely unbearable.
My position therefore seems clear enough to me, and I
am anxious to hear what you will have to say about it. For
even if I am convinced that this is the only right way, and
that if I miss putting this plan into action I shall miss some¬
thing of decisive importance, yet it is naturally very impor¬
tant for me to know what you have to say to it all.
With best love,
Your Franz

But these plans were not to mature. The Great War broke
out. A period began against the background of which all we
had ever suffered hitherto retired by comparison into a land
of fairy tales round which played a rosy glow of childhood.
Undaunted by all the excitement, Franz worked at three
manuscripts simultaneously, The Trial, In the Penal Col¬
ony, “The Railroad in Russia.” In October he took a week s
leave, “to push the novel on a bit.” He prolonged his leave by
a further week. “Fourteen days, good work in parts, complete
understanding of my position.” A letter arrived from F.’s girl
friend, which attempted to mediate between them. The re¬
lationship with F. had been dropped for two months by this
time, although a correspondence was still kept up during this
period with F.’s sister. To the answer to F. s friend s letter, a
copy of which he kept for himself, and in which he writes, I
149
don’t wish to mention what your letter coincided with,” he
adds the note, “Suicide, letter to Max with a lot of requests.’
And somewhat later, “Have been turning over the pages of
my diary. Have got some kind of idea of the organization of
such a life.”
It is astonishing that his creative powers did not fail in the
midst of all these visitations. But on the contrary, they were
just at their height at that period. On December 13 he
finished his “Exegesis of the Legend”; that was how he him¬
self described the chapter which I have published as the
ninth—next to last—in The Trial—and writes about it in his
diary, “Contentment and a feeling of happiness, which I feel
particularly in face of the Legend.” 1 Already on December
19 he writes, “Yesterday I wrote The Village Schoolmaster
almost without knowing what I was doing.” He is referring to
the story of The Giant Mole. In the Christmas holidays he
took a little trip with my wife and me to Kuttenberg, to look
at the architectural monuments there, and to have a short
rest—it was only four days—from the terrors and privations
of the war which were already making themselves very much
felt in the city. In a hotel in Kolin he read aloud to us the
unfinished last chapter of his American novel, which inspired
us with the brightest enthusiasm. (This trip was preceded by
a trip to Hellerau with Otto Pick in the summer of the same
year.) On the last day of December 1914, contrary to his
usual custom, he made a review of his work: “Have been
working since August, in general not little and not bad, but
neither from the first nor the second point of view to the limit
of my capacities, particularly as my capacities, judging by
all the prospects—sleeplessness, headaches, weak heart—will
not last very much longer. Written, unfinished: The Trial,
Memories of the Kalda Railroad, The Village Schoolmaster,
The Assistant Public Prosecutor, and short beginnings. Fin¬
ished, only In the Penal Colony, and one chapter of The Man
Who Disappeared, both during my fortnight’s holiday. I
don’t know why I am making this survey, it’s not in my line
at all.”
1 “Before the Law.”
150
 The relationship with F. was far from being finished and
done with. In the last months of 1914 it experienced a painful
rebirth. It goes against the grain for me to go into details, it
is enough, apart from the extensive correspondence—there
are extant perhaps several hundred letters from Franz to F.
—to mention the main stages, a meeting at Bodenbach, Jan¬
uary 1915, and in Marienbad, July 1916, and to make clear
the constant and increasingly important connection between
this great experience and Kafka’s creative work and religious
development. His mood is one of despair. In his diary he
writes: “Am I to lodge my complaint here, in order to find
salvation here? It won’t come from this copybook, it will
come when I am in bed, and will lay me on my back, so that
I lie beautiful and light and bluish white; no other salvation
will come.” Or, “I think it is impossible we should ever be¬
come one, but don’t dare to say it either to her, or, at tire
decisive moment, to myself.” Or, “The hardship of living
together. Under the compulsion of strangeness, pity, cow¬
ardice, vanity, and only deep down in the ground a thin
trickle of a brook worthy to be called love, not to be found
when you look for it, but suddenly shining forth in the
twinkling of an eye.” Or one of these comparative fists which
are much more likely to make a decision much harder than to
prepare the way for one.

August 20, 1916.

To remain chaste. To get married.
Bachelor. Married man.
I remain chaste. Chaste?
I preserve all my powers in You will remain without your coher¬
coherence. ence; you will become an idiot,
will follow every wind, but will
never get any forwarder. I draw
from the blood circulation of hu¬
man life all the power that is avail¬
able for me.
Responsible only for myself. The more infatuated with yourself.
(Grillparzer, Flaubert.)
No worries, concentration As I grow in strength I shall stand
on work. more. But there is a certain kernel
of truth in this.
151
 At the same time there is no lack of assertions in which he
pictures to himself a marriage with F. as something com¬
pletely possible and desirable. Thus he writes to me from
Marienbad, “But now I have seen the look of trust on a
woman’s face, and could not shut myself against it. Many a
thing gets torn up that I wanted to preserve forever (it isn’t
single details, but wholes), and from this tear there comes
out, I know it, enough misery for more than one man’s life;
but it is not something one has summoned up, but something
laid upon one. I have no right to defend myself against it,
because to receive just that look again, I should do that which
happens voluntarily, with my own hand, were it not to hap¬
pen.” And, “Now it is all different and all right. Our compact
is, in brief: Get married shortly after the war is over; take
two or three rooms in a Berlin suburb; leave each one only
his own economic worries; F. will go on working as before,
and I, well I, that I can’t yet say. But if nevertheless you look
at the menage carefully, you get the picture of two rooms, in
Karlshorst, shall we say; in one F. gets up early, runs off to
work and falls dead tired into her bed in the evening; in the
other there is a sofa, on which I lie and feed myself on milk
and honey. ‘There he lies and takes his ease, the man whom
morals do not tease,’ as the saying goes. Nevertheless—now
there is peace there, certainty, and therefore the possibility
of living.” P.S.—“Looking back on them, strong words, hardly
to be held down forever by a weak pen.”
In a certain sense F. remained still later, even after the final
farewell, an ideal figure for Franz. Thus he writes to me from
a sanatorium, when I wrote and told him about my lectures
in Berlin: “Wasn’t F. at your lectures? To have been in Berlin
and not to have seen F., it seems to me, privately, all wrong,
although of course it would have been exactly the same had I
been there. For F.—a happy mother of two children—I have
the love an unfortunate commander has for a town he could
never take, and which has nevertheless somehow become
great.” Elsewhere he writes, “I loved a girl who loved me too,
but I had to leave her . . . and so on.”
152
 For five years Kafka’s strivings to wrest a marriage with F.
from himself and the opposing circumstances were the pre¬
vailing motive in his life, the thorn in his creative work and
in his harassed religious questionings. He read a lot of Strind¬
berg at this period—also the Bible, Dostoievski, Pascal,
Herzen, and Kropotkin. On Herzen’s “London Fog,” he
passed the following judgment: “I had no idea what it was all
about, and yet the complete, unknown man emerged, pur¬
poseful, self-torturing, in control of himself and then again
falling to pieces.” Werfel used to read his poems aloud for
him, from a drama called “Esther, Empress of Persia,” for ex¬
ample. He took a lively interest in all the positive activities of
his friends, as for instance in the courses of lectures Felix
Weltsch was giving; he always cheered them up, praised, crit¬
icized, encouraged, allowed none—except himself—to yield to
despair, interested himself in my work in the school for refu¬
gee children from Galicia, often came to my lessons, made
friends with the family of one of my little girl pupils. An un¬
derstanding of the tenderest kind developed between him and
the eldest daughter of this family. He also took part in debates
between Jews from the East and Jews from the West—in
silence, observing. At that time I used to spend a lot of time,
together with my cabalistic friend Georg Langer at the house
of a miracle-working rabbi, a refugee from Galicia who
lived in dark, unfriendly, crowded rooms in the Prague sub¬
urb Zizkov. Unusual circumstances of life had brought me
near to a kind of religious fanaticism. It is worthy of note
that Franz, whom I took with me to a “Third Meal” at
the close of the Sabbath, with its whispering and hasidic
chants, remained, I must admit, very cool. He was un¬
doubtedly moved by the age-old sounds of an ancient
folk life, but on the way home he said, “If you look at it
properly, it was just as if we had been among a tribe of
African savages. Sheerest superstition.” There was nothing
insulting, but certainly a sober rejection in these words. I
understood him very well. Franz had his own personal mys¬
ticism, he couldn’t take over from others a ready-made
153
ritual.1 He was often alone, and enjoyed being alone. The
“most beautiful place in Prague” was the description he gave
of the Chotek gardens, where he used to go again and again
for lonely walks. “The birds were singing, the castle with its
gallery, the ancient trees, with last year’s leaves still hanging
on them, the semi-darkness.”
He also made some energetic attempts at this time to
escape from the spell of the family circle, to become inde¬
pendent. For some time he didn’t live with his people but in
a room of his own. The first he took was in Bilek street, Feb¬
ruary 1915, the second in Langen street, Dlouha, in the house
“At the Sign of the Golden Pike,” where in April 1915 he gave
me unutterable pleasure and compelled my admiration by
reading me the fifth and sixth chapters of The Trial. In Feb¬
ruary he wrote Investigations of a Dog. He passes a very se¬
vere judgment on this story in the diary: “I have just been
reading the beginning. It is ugly and gives one a headache.
For all the truth it contains, it is bad, pedantic, mechanical, a
fish just able to gasp on a sandbank. I am writing ‘Bouvard
and Pecuchef 2 at a very early age. If the two elements most
clearly stamped on The Stoker and In the Penal Colony don’t
unite, I am finished. But is there any prospect at hand of such
a union?” By the two elements he means most probably the
realistic-hopeful and the idealistic-severe tendencies in his
writings.
One journey that Franz made with his sister to Vienna,
Budapest, and Nagy-Mihaly to see his brother-in-law, who
had been called up, brought him very near the front. Then
Franz received his “calling-up papers,” but was exempted as
being employed in an indispensable Government office.
Later, when he could see no way out of his difficulties any
longer, he tried to have his exemption canceled and go into
the army. His illness brought this plan to nothing.
The award of the Fontane prize in October 1915 was a
temporary consolation in the midst of these sorrows, and was
1 Yet the impression was strong and had its after-effects. The begin¬
ning of a Golem story seems to go back to this episode.
2 i.e., a work displaying every sign of an old man’s opus.
154
accepted with a certain amount of satisfaction. If I am not
mistaken, this is how it all happened; that it was Sternheim
who was really awarded the prize, but handed it down to the
“young writer” for his short story, “The Stoker,” which had
already been published in 1913. Poor consolation. For in the
diary you find wild pen-and-ink drawings, complaints with¬
out end about sleeplessness and headaches, the beginning of
the meditation on the fall of man, lines like: “The ragings of
God against the human family”; “Only the Old Testament
sees—say nothing about it yet”; “Take me, take me, network
that I am of madness and pain”; and also the fragments from
which I have reconstructed the poem, “In the troubled heart
a clock strikes.” He reproaches himself in his conduct to¬
wards F. with “the office clerk’s vices of weakness, meanness,
indecision, counting the cost, caution.” And again, “the soul
of a clerk, childishness, a will broken by my father.” “Im¬
prove it, work at it, it lies directly to your hand. That means
then, don’t spare yourself (at the cost moreover of the human
life of F. whom you love), because you can’t spare yourself;
this apparent sparing of yourself has now already almost
ruined you. It is not only the question of sparing yourself as
far as F., marriage, children, responsibility, etc., are con¬
cerned, but sparing yourself as far as the office in which you
are stuck is concerned.” And in his agony the following
prayer is wrung from him, “Have mercy on me, I am sinful in
every corner of my being. But I had not entirely despicable
talents, little, tender capabilities, dissipated them, ill-advised
person that I was, am now ready at the last gasp, at a time
when outwardly everything might take a turn for the good
for me. Don’t thrust me among the lost souls.”
Unmistakably two kinds of causes working together ef¬
fected Kafka’s engagement tragedy, exactly as they did the
tragedy of his employment: those of a metaphysical, and
those of an economic, nature. As far as the latter are con¬
cerned, the fact cannot be overlooked that Franz’s financial
position was, in fact, extremely unfavorable if he followed
the dictates of his pride, and refused to call on his parents’
aid, and was not prepared to do violence to his gift of writing.
155
Perhaps one can imagine a social and political order in which
such a unique narrative talent and such a literary genius
would not be damned to scribbling legal documents, and
when he thinks of the marriage he wishes to make and the
responsibility towards wife and children bound up with it,
would not see himself faced with the abyss and flaming de¬
spair. “You belong to me,'’ he once wrote to F. (according to
a copy of the letter in the diary), “I have taken you to myself.
I can’t believe that in any fairy story any woman was more
often and more desperately fought for, than you were in me.
Certainly Kafka would have had a hard time of it even in an
ideal social order; the metaphysical, erotic roots of his pain,
the irremovable misery would then have come out more
clearly. But in his soul the corresponding antidotes would
have been found. Anyhow, as a result of our as yet still very
primitively organized community, he foundered on obstacles
which were removable (I call them in another passage
“ignoble”), and therefore the great struggle in the meta¬
physical sense never found expression at the right level.
In the winter of 1916-17, Franz lived in Alchemists’ street.
Legends are already growing up around the place where he
stayed, and foreigners who come to Prague are shown the
tiny little house and the room that “the author” used to live
in—they are almost identical. The house consists of only the
one room, together with a tiny kitchen and a loft. But Franz
didn’t choose this quarter at all from any mystic or romantic
inclination, or at least any such inclination was not the de¬
ciding factor, except perhaps subconsciously, in the form of
an old love for old Prague; in the foreground was Franz’s
need for a quiet place to work in. His extraordinarily keen
sensitivity to noise, with which he even occasionally infected
me, by suggestion—when we traveled together, for example
—made the choice difficult. In Alchemists’ street Franz felt
comparatively happy, and was extremely grateful to his
youngest sister who had discovered this refuge for him—as
she did another later in Ziirau. On February 11, 1917, a Sun¬
day, I wrote, “With Kafka in Alchemists’ street. He read
aloud beautifully. The monastic cell of a real writer.” A letter
156
to F., the copy of which has been preserved in the posthu¬
mous papers, gives an account of this lodging, in which was
conceived The Bucket Rider—the sole thing of beauty that
came out of the coal shortage, with its quietly sad gaiety, its
ironic treatment of human weaknesses, as though looking at
them from above, its singing quality—and of Franz’s next
lodging in the Schonborn Mansions. At the same time the se¬
riousness with which Franz approached the preparations for
his marriage can be seen from this letter. It is a fact that in the
following summer a flat was taken for the young couple, fur¬
niture was bought, and Franz had already begun the conven¬
tional round of calls on relatives and acquaintances and even
went to Hungary, to Arad, with F., to pay a visit to her sister.
Franz and the conventions! It was a pitiful sight. At the same
time he certainly made every effort to conform to the conven¬
tions that were held to be seemly. Another partner might, it
is true, have freed him from this compulsion with a good
hearty laugh. At the same time it is doubtful, too, whether
Franz would have accepted or wanted this freedom. Comi¬
cally enough the pair of them paid even me a formal call, on
July 9, 1917—the sight of the two, both rather embarrassed,
above all Franz, wearing an unaccustomed high stiff collar,
had something moving in it, and at the same time something
horrible. (On July 23 after this there was quite a large party
at my place, at which were present in addition to Kafka,
Adolf Schreiber, the musician, Werfel, Otto Gross and his
wife. Gross unfolded a plan for a newspaper which very much
interested Kafka—this is the last note I have on him before the
catastrophe.) The letter to F. that deals with questions of the
flat and the wedding follows below (the beginning refers to
the flat in Dlouha—the stay in Munich was the occasion for a
reading, at which Kafka read, besides works of his own, also
some poems from my “Promised Land,” and with his usual
conscientiousness insisted afterwards on handing over a
share of his fee to me).

Dearest
Well, here is the history of my flat. A tremendous theme.
157
I am terrified I shall not be able to master it. Too big for me.
I shall be able to relate only a thousandth of it, of that thou¬
sandth only one-thousandth will come back to me when I
begin writing, and only one-thousandth of that shall I be
able to make clear to you, and so on. Nevertheless, it must
be done, I want to have your advice. So read carefully and
advise me well: how much sorrow I have had for two years
you know; little in comparison with the contemporary sor¬
row of the world, but sufficient for me. A comfortable,
friendly room on a corner, two windows, a door leading on
to a balcony. A view over lots of roofs and churches. Tol¬
erable people, because after a little practice there was no
need for me to see them any more. A noisy street, heavy
lorries at dawn, to which however I had already almost got
accustomed. A room, however, that I couldn’t live in. It is
true it lies at the end of a very long entrance hall, and to out¬
ward appearance is sufficiently shut off, but the house is a
concrete one; I hear, or rather heard, until well past ten in
the evening tire sighing of my neighbors, the talking of the
people on the floor below, now and then a clatter from the
kitchen. Moreover, just above the thin ceiling is the loft, and
one cannot count the number of times, late in the afternoon,
when I am just settling down to work, some servant girl
hanging out her washing digs her heel so to speak innocently
into my skull. Now and then, too, someone would play the
piano, and in summer, from the semi-circle of the other
houses that cluster around, there would be singing, a violin,
and a gramophone. Even an approximation to complete
peace then, not before eleven at night. Well then, impossi¬
bility of finding peace, complete homelessness, breeding-
grounds for every kind of madness, ever increasing weakness
and hopelessness. How much more there is to say on this
subject! But let us get on! In summer I once went flat-hunting
with Ottla, I didn’t any more believe in the possibility of
real peace, but all the same I went in search of it. We looked
at a few places on the Mala Strana, all the time I was think¬
ing, if only there were some place in a quiet attic comer in
one of the old palaces, where one could at last stretch oneself
158
out in peace. Nothing; we found nothing that would do. For
a joke we asked in one of the little alleys. Yes, there would
be a little house to let in November. Ottla, who is also, only
in her own way, looking for peace, fell in love with the idea
of taking the house. I with my native weakness advised her
against it. That I could be there too, that hardly entered my
head. So small, so dirty, so uninhabitable, with every con¬
ceivable inconvenience. But she insisted on it, and after the
huge family that had inhabited it had moved out, had it
painted, bought a few pieces of cane furniture (I know of
nothing more comfortable in the way of chairs than a cane
one), kept it, and keeps it, a secret from the family. At about
that time I came back from Munich full of fresh courage,
went into a flat agency, where almost the first thing they
offered me was a flat in one of the most beautiful of the pal¬
aces. Two rooms and a hall, one half of which had been
fitted up as a bathroom. Six hundred crowns a year. It was
like a dream come true. I went to see it. The rooms were
lofty and beautiful, red and gold, like something in Ver¬
sailles. Four windows looking on to an entirely hidden quiet
courtyard, one window looking over the garden. The garden!
When you come to the gate of the castle, you can hardly be¬
lieve your eyes. Through the lofty semi-circle of the second
door which is flanked by caryatids standing on stone steps,
beautifully divided in a zig-zag to the great garden, you see
a broad balustrade rising gradually and in sweeping curves
to a gloriette. Well, the flat has one small fault. The former
lessee, a young man living apart from his wife, had made his
home in the flat, with his manservant, for a few months only,
was then unexpectedly transferred (he is a civil servant),
had to leave Prague, but had invested so much money in the
flat in this short space of time that he was unwilling to give it
up just like that. So he was hanging on to it and looking for
someone who would at least in part cover his outlay—putting
in electric light, fitting up a bathroom, building cupboards,
putting in a telephone, and laying down a big carpet. I was
not the man he was looking for. He wanted 650 crowns for
it—certainly little enough. It was too much for me, also the
159
over-lofty, chilly rooms were too magnificent for me; finally
I had no furniture after all, and there were other, smaller
considerations to be taken into account as well. Now in the
same castle, however, there was another flat to let, direct
from the agent, on the second floor, the ceilings somewhat
lower, looking on to the street, the Hradschin close up in
front of the window. The furniture was more friendly, more
human, modest; a countess who had been here on a visit,
probably a person with more modest pretensions, had lived
in it; it was still arranged as she had had it, with a maidenly
air about it, its furniture consisting of a few old pieces
thrown together. But there was some doubt as to whether
the flat could be got. That threw me into despair at the time.
And in this state I moved into Ottla’s house, which just hap¬
pened to be ready at the time. There was a lot wrong with it
in the beginning. I haven’t the time to go into the whole
story. Now it suits me down to the ground. To sum up its
advantages: the lovely way up to it, the quiet there—from
my sole neighbor I am separated by only a very thin wall-
but the neighbor is quiet enough, and generally stays there
until midnight; and then the benefit of the walk home: I have
to make up my mind to stop. I then have the walk that cools
my head. And the life there: it is something special to have
one’s own house, to shut in the face of the world the door
not of your room, not of your flat, but of your own house; to
step out through the door of your lodgings straight into the
snow of a quiet alley. All that for twenty crowns a month,
provided with everything I need by my sister, “done” by the
little flower-girl (Ottla’s pupil) for as little as is necessary,
everything lovely and in order. And just at this moment it
turns out that the flat in the castle is at my disposal after all.
The manager, whom I once did a favor, is very kindly dis¬
posed towards me. I get the flat on the street I told you
about for 600—without the furniture on which I had counted,
it is true. There are two rooms and a hall. There is electric
light there, but no bathroom, certainly, not even a bath; but
I don’t need one. Now in brief, the advantages of my present
lodgings as compared with the flat in the castle: 1. The ad-
160
vantage of letting things be as they are; 2.1 am content now;
after all, why create for myself the possibility of regrets;
3. Losing a house of one’s own; 4. Losing my nightly walk
that is an aid to sleep; 5. I should have to borrow furniture
from the sister who is living with us now; for the one room,
which is enormously big, I should have really only a bed.
The cost of moving; 6. Now I live ten minutes nearer the
office. The flat in the castle faces west, I fancy; my room gets
the morning sun. On the other hand, the advantages of the
flat in the castle: 1. The advantage of change in general and
change in particular; 2. The advantage of a quiet lodging of
one’s own; 3. In the flat I have now to work in, I am after all
not entirely independent; really I am taking it away from
Ottla; kind and self-sacrificing as she is towards me, one day
when she is in a bad mood she will let me know it without
wanting to. It’s true she will certainly be sorry if I stop com¬
ing to the little house; at bottom she is quite satisfied if she
can be there occasionally in the afternoon and on Sundays
till six o’clock; 4.1 shan’t have my walk home, it is true; going
out at night will also be difficult, because the gate cannot be
opened from the outside, but to balance that I can very well
take a little walk at night in the part of the park which is
otherwise reserved for the gentry. 5. After the war I shall try
at any rate to get a year’s leave, if I can, but that will surely
not be possible now—if I get any leave at all. Well in that case
we two would have the most wonderful place to live in that
I can imagine in Prague, all ready for you, only for a com¬
paratively short time it’s true, during which you would have
to go without a kitchen of your own, and even without a
bathroom. But anyhow it would be to my taste, and you
could have a thorough rest for two or three months. The
indescribable park, perhaps in spring, in summer (the gentry
are away), or in autumn. But if I don’t make sure of the flat
now, immediately, either by moving in, or—mad extrava¬
gance that is far beyond the capacity of a civil servant to
grasp—by paying the rent only, 150 crowns a quarter, I shall
hardly be able to get it later. To confess the truth, I have
taken it already; but the agent will certainly release me from
161
my undertaking with pleasure, particularly as the whole af¬
fair, I can well understand, has not the tiniest fraction of the
importance for him that it has for me. How little I have told
you! But give me your opinion, and soon.

His coughing blood, which began in August for the first

time, Franz described as being psychic in origin. That is how
I find it noted down without possibility of doubt in my diary
in his own words. “August 24,1917. Steps taken in the matter
of Kafka’s illness. He insists it is psychic, just like something
to save him from marriage. He calls it his final defeat. And
yet he has been sleeping well since. Has he found release?
Tormented soul!” It is possible that the flat in the Schonbom
Palace, which couldn’t be heated, hastened the breaking out
of the illness, and that therefore his father, who warned him
against “extravagances” of this kind, and who always ex¬
pressed his deep disapproval of them, once more appeared
after all to be right in a certain sense. This aspect of his ill¬
ness which Kafka probably never took into consideration
might be taken straight out of one of his own short stories,
from which, however, the only thing that emerges clearly is
the close connection between his life and his creative func¬
tion. If you go deeper, however, the illness was after all the
result of years of stress, efforts to unfold his literary gifts to
the full despite all the hindrances of his profession, and his
marriage plans, and of the bodily weakness bound up with
all that, combined with “hygienic” treatment that only a
much stronger body could have supported.
It took till September 4 before I could finally persuade
Franz to call in a doctor. In such matters he was quite un¬
believably pig-headed; it took a great deal of patience and
perseverance to handle him properly. My description of the
decisive, wretched day runs:
“September 4. In the afternoon went with Kafka to Pro¬
fessor Friedl Pick. It has taken all that time to carry it
through.
“Catarrh in the lungs diagnosed. Must have three months’
leave. There is a danger of T.B. My God! Nothing so horrible
162
can happen. Then the Sophie Island. Swimming-pool with
Franz. He feels himself released and beaten at the same
time. There is a part in him which resists, and considers mar¬
riage as a distraction from the one direction of his gaze—
towards the absolute. Another part fights for marriage as in
accordance with nature. This struggle has worn him out. He
considers his illness as a punishment, because he has often
wished for a violent solution. But this solution is too drastic
for him. He quotes against God, from the Meistersinger, 1
should have taken him for more of a gentleman.’ ”
Then: “December 10. Went with Kafka to see Professor
Pick again. His revelation that he had been learning Hebrew,
forty-five lessons in Rath’s handbook; never said anything to
me about it. So he was trying me out when he asked me some
time ago, with every appearance of innocence, how do you
count in Hebrew. This making a big secret of everything.
There is something very great about it, but also something
evil.”
To go to a sanatorium for T.B. patients—Franz fought
against the idea with all his might. It was not until he was
older that he had to give in. You might find a certain self-
contradiction in the fact that he refused to go and stay in
any sanatorium now that it was advisable for him to do so,
whereas in previous years he had gone for a rest to sana-
toriums like Erlenbach near Zurich, Jungborn in the Harz
Mountains, Hartungen in Riva. But these had been centers
of “nature healing methods,” where Franz spent days, or
even weeks, so to speak, profitably pandering to the “living-
according-to-nature” which he loved and also made fun of,
but which at the very bottom, he welcomed so hopefully.
The threat of institutions run according to orthodox medical
principles was quite another thing; and it was only to be ex¬
pected from Franz’s way of looking at things that he should
resist such demands upon him as long as possible. Chance
came to his aid this time. Franz’s youngest sister took over
the management of a small estate that belonged to her
brother-in-law at Ziirau (Post Flohau, near Saaz). It was de¬
cided and finally agreed upon by all sides that Franz should
163
spend his convalescent leave there. This leave was prolonged
several times, once or twice Franz tried to take up his office
work again but succeeded only for short spaces of time. At
last it became inevitable that he should be retired. From his
surroundings at Ziirau, where Franz was for the first time
brought into close contact with country life, farming, Ger¬
man peasants, grew the novel The Castle.
On September 12 I wrote in my diary, “Said goodbye to
Kafka. It hurts me. I have not been without him for such a
long time for years. He now thinks he can’t marry F. because
of his illness. Despairing letter from her, although she knows
nothing about it yet. Two people come from the shop with
handcarts to take his luggage. He says, ‘They are coming for
the coffin.’ ”
Now I got very many letters from him; they are too pre¬
cious to be given piecemeal. I must hope I shall one day be
able to publish them complete. They throw light on Kafka’s
studies of Kierkegaard, which grew deeper and deeper, and
on his religious and ethical development. Other letters from
Ziirau—to Baum and Weltsch—have already appeared in my
collected edition of Kafka. They give the picture, growing
clearer and clearer, of a man who feels himself at home in
the most primitive of country districts, and never wishes to
return to the town. Characteristic of his mood and of the
fundamental material of the novel The Castle are pages in
the diary like these: “Was at Farmer Liiftner’s. The great
long room. The whole thing quite theatrical. There he is
with his ‘Ho hoi’ and his ‘Ha ha,’ and banging on the table,
and waving his arms and shrugging his shoulders and raising
his glass of beer like somebody out of Wallenstein. Sitting
next to him is his wife, an old woman whom he married when
he was her serving-lad ten years before. His passion is to be
out with a gun; he neglects his farm. Two gigantic horses in
the stable, Homeric forms, in a fleeting ray of sunshine that
came through the stable window.” Slowly Franz got better.
Only when a letter came from F. he wouldn’t eat for half a
day, and didn’t open the letter. I myself, caught up in ter¬
rible soul-storms, as well as in a heap of work, unfortunately
164
never went to see Franz in Ziirau. I met him only at the rail¬
way station of Michelob, where he traveled down to meet
me, when I was giving a lecture somewhere near the place.
Moreover, he used to come to Prague for a day or two from
time to time, to settle things that could not be put off. Oskar
Baum spent a week with him as his guest at Ziirau; the “vil¬
lage was then under deep snow,” Baum writes in his Mem¬
oirs. “In the long nights we talked right through till the
morning, I got to know more about him than in the ten pre¬
vious years, and the five that followed.”
In September still, that is to say, soon after the diagnosis
of the serious illness, F. came to see him. The diary reports:
“F. was here; traveled thirty hours to see me. I should have
stopped her. As I imagine it to myself she is suffering the ut¬
most unhappiness essentially through my faults I myself
can’t control myself; I am quite unfeeling, and just as help¬
less, keep thinking of the disturbance of a few of my com¬
forts, and the only thing I do by way of compromise, is to
do a little play-acting. In small details, she is wrong, wrong
in defending the rights she pretends to or perhaps really has,
but on the whole she is an innocent woman condemned to
be severely tortured; I have committed the fault for which
she is being tortured, and even work the rack. The day ends
with her departure (the carriage, with her and O. in it, goes
round the pond, while I take a short cut straight across which
brings me near her once more) and a headache (the left-over
of my play-acting).”
At the beginning of November I recorded a conversation
with Franz. It had to do with my conflict with myself, but
throws light on his own too.
“He: That’s the way it is always. The fault lies just in the
fact that we think things over.
“I: Well, should one do things without thinking them
over?
“He: That is, of course, not a law. But it is written: Thou
shalt not be able to think things over. You can’t do it by
force. Thinking things over is the advice of the serpent. But it
is also good and human. Without it one is lost.”
165
 At the end of December Franz came to Prague, met F.
here, who, as the manageress of a big Berlin firm—tact, effi¬
ciency, generosity are among her excellent qualities—had to
use her Christmas holidays to come and have the last talk
with him. The tragic drama was nearing its end. On the eve¬
ning of December 25, Franz and F. were the guests of my
wife and myself. "Both unhappy, don t talk. On December
26 I wrote, "Kafka came at half-past seven in the morning,
wants me to give him my morning. Cafe Paris. But it isnt to
get advice that he wants me for, his firmness of purpose is
admirable. Yesterday he told F. everything quite clearly. We
spoke about everything but that. Kafka on Tolstoy s Resur¬
rection: ‘You cannot write about salvation, you can only five
it/ In the afternoon, an excursion with Baum and Weltsch. So
three married couples, alongside Kafka and F. Kafka un¬
happy. He said to me, ‘What I have to do, I can do only
alone. Become clear about the ultimate things. The Western
Jew is not clear about them, and therefore has no right to
marry. There are no marriages for them. Unless he is the
kind that is not interested in such things—business men for
example/ ”
The next morning Franz came to my office to see me. To
rest for one moment, he said. He had just been to the station
to see F. off. His face was pale, hard, and severe. But sud¬
denly he began to cry. It was the only time I saw him cry. I
shall never forget the scene, it is one of the most terrible I
have ever experienced. I was not sitting alone in my office;
right close up to my desk was the desk of a colleague—we
worked in the legal section of the general post office. This
particular section was housed on the top floor of a block of
flats, not in the main office building of the G.P.O. The way
in which the office had succeeded in turning a friendly
four-room flat, with kitchen and bathroom into proper
dusty, ugly, impersonal office premises, into something bad-
temperedly unreal, had something uncanny about it. Private
visitors such as I sometimes had, I generally received—and
this too with a guilty conscience—in the kitchen, which had
been half pulled down and turned into a lumber room for
166
legal documents. But Kafka had come straight into the room
I worked in, to see me, in the middle of all the office work,
sat near my desk on a small chair which stood there ready
for bearers of petitions, pensioners, and debtors. And in this
place he was crying, in this place he said between his sobs:
“Is it not terrible that such a thing must happen?” The tears
were streaming down his cheeks. I have never except this
once seen him upset quite without control of himself.
A few days later he returned to Ziirau. He showed me an¬
other very unhappy letter from F. His attitude towards her,
however, was quite firm, he had given up not only her, but
any possibility of married bliss. The pain he inflicted on him¬
self gave him the strength to conquer his natural weakness
even where others were concerned, and not to turn back
when he had once realized the inevitability of the bitter
decision.
Some fifteen months later I received the news that F. had
got married. I broke the news gently to Franz. He was moved,
full of the most sincere good wishes for the new marriage,
wishes that then to his great joy were duly fulfilled. “It is a
good thing that some things which are insoluble seem to find
a solution after all,” was how I summed up the story for my¬
self, knowing full well that on Franz’s side at least it was far
from the case that a road to salvation had been thrown open
by the disappearance of this one overshadowing problem.

167
 CHAPTER VI

RELIGIOUS DEVELOPMENT

KAFKA’S failure to find a way out was, from now on, chiefly
due to his illness which, rising out of the crises of his soul, or
at least harmfully stimulated by them, had developed into
an evil that had its own independent, injurious, nay devas¬
tating, effect, and to which Franz finally succumbed. Franz
bore his sufferings heroically, generally even with cheerful
equanimity. Only once, in his later years, did I ever hear him
complain about pain. I went to see him after he had had a
severe bout of fever. He was lying in bed; while he was
speaking he pulled a face: “It takes such a long time before
one is crushed up quite small, and squeezed through this last
narrow hole.” As he was saying this he was clenching his
hand as if he were crumpling a handkerchief up in it.
Until the summer of 1918, Franz stayed, with short inter¬
ruptions, in Ziirau. Then he came to Prague, worked for some
time again in the Civil Service, but devoted his afternoons
to gardening at the Pomologic Institute in Troja, a suburb of
Prague. I often used to go and call for him there, and take
him for long walks. We had two chief topics—the war, and
learning Hebrew. At that time, too, I was asking his advice
on a literary affair. Kafka’s sense of justice, his love of the
truth, his simple honesty that never had the least pose about
it were unsurpassable. “One must limit oneself to what one
is absolutely master of’ is one of his sayings that I have pre¬
served from those days. Sometimes, I must admit, this led
in his case to a state in which he curled up painfully in him¬
self. He wanted to withdraw from everything, finally even
to give up meeting me.
On July 1, 1918, I have a note on his views: “Country as
opposed to town. And yet he feels better in Prague, because
in Ziirau he was lying about doing nothing. Here he studies
Hebrew and gardening. The positive things in his life. Wants
168
to keep these quite pure—they are the ‘country things.’
Would like to withdraw from everything else.”
“July 3. Sleepless night because of Kafka. Feel I am de¬
serted, but respect his decision. There has never been any
quarrel. His fine way of seeing what is positive in every¬
body—even in his opponents—what they are right in, what
they can do nothing else about—Hans Bliiher, for example—
often comforted me, gave me a basis. His confidence that a
pure intention, an objective piece of work is never meaning¬
less, that nothing good can ever go lost—on that I leaned for
support.” This “obituary,” however, is immediately followed
by the correction, “A few days later he came along to me.
Then often on the Sophie Island, the swimming-baths with
him. Troja, too.”
The following extract from one of his letters gives an ac¬
count of the severity with which he conducted his own life
and judged everything at this period. I had passed on to
him a request from an actress who wanted to give a reading
from his books in Frankfort. He wrote back to me, from
Ziirau, “I am not sending anything to Frankfort; I don’t feel
it is a matter that I should bother about. If I send anything I
shall be doing it out of vanity; if I don’t send anything, it
will also be out of vanity, but not out of vanity alone, that is
to say, out of something better. The pieces I could send mean
really nothing to me, I respect only the moment in which I
wrote them; and now an actress, who can find something
much more effective with which to show herself off, is to drag
them out of the abyss into which they are sooner or later to
fall, and give them a moment of glory for one evening? That
would be senseless trouble.”
But he didn’t always dismiss all his literary work so con¬
temptuously. He began to arrange the stories which were to
be put together to form the volume The Country Doctor. This
time he even insisted on having them published. That can be
seen from the following lines—also addressed to me from
Ziirau: “Thanks for speaking to Wolff’s for me. Since I have
decided to dedicate the book to my father, I lay great im¬
portance on its coming out soon. Not as though I could recon-
169
cile my father by doing so, the roots of this enmity are
ineradicable in this case; but I should, all the same, have at
least traveled along the map with my finger even if I haven’t
emigrated to Palestine.”
One sees from these few lines how strongly Kafka’s yearn¬
ing to be made a proper member of the family, for peace
with his father, links up with incorporation into the people s
way of life (Palestine) that is after nature’s plan and
morally right; and in fact these motives, which are nothing
else than a making concrete of Kafka’s fundamental prob¬
lem-how is a properly fulfilled life for everybody, the whole
of mankind, to be realized?—make themselves felt with ever
increasing force in the last years of Kafka’s life.
What I emphasize, and what I believe distinguishes my
exposition of Kafka from all the others—e.g. Schoeps, Vietta,
and Stumpf—is the fact that I consider that the positive side
of him, his love of life, of the earth earthy, and his religion
in the sense of a properly fulfilled life, is his decisive message,
and not self-abnegation, turning his back on life, despair—
the “tragic position.”
The three quotations which I have placed at the head of
this monograph speak a clear language. I beg you to read
them again before going on with the text. Without these
guiding sentences one cannot, so I think, ever understand
Kafka’s religious position. The hopefulness that lies in these
and similar sayings of Kafka’s must not be conjured away.
Only by overlooking propositions like this, with their positive
outlook, could one arrive at the point of placing Kafka in
line with the “theology of the crisis”—with that religious
tendency that sees between God and man, between man and
the good deeds that are to be achieved by human strength,
a yawning abyss that can never be bridged. It is significant
that Franz, in a letter to me, draws attention to just those
passages in Kierkegaard which explain not the powerlessness
but the good moral strength and effective possibilities of
mankind. Kafka quotes Kierkegaard with the introductory
words, “And the following passage is not from the Talmud,”
which, when placed alongside my letter, is as much as to say,
170
 It corresponds with Jewish modes of thought; although it is
to be found not in the Talmud but in Kierkegaard’s books.”
He quotes the following great sentence: “As soon as a man
appears who brings something of the primitive along with
him, so that he doesn’t say, ‘You must take the world as you
find it,’ but rather ‘Let the world be what it likes, I take my
stand on a primitiveness which I have no intention of chang¬
ing to meet with the approval of the world,’ at that moment,
as these words are heard, a metamorphosis takes place in the
whole of nature. Just as in a fairy story, when the right word
is pronounced, the castle that has been lying under a spell
for a hundred years opens and everything comes to life, in
the same way existence becomes all attention. The angels
have something to do, and watch curiously to see what will
come of it, because that is their business. On the other side,
dark, uncanny demons, who have been sitting around doing
nothing and chewing at their nails for a long time, jump up
and stretch their limbs, because, they say, here is something
for us, and so on.”
While I lay special worth on the hopeful side of Kafka’s
work, which rejoices in activity, that is to say in the funda¬
mental recognition of the fact that man, with his spark of
reason, will, and ethical perception is not altogether the play¬
thing of super-mighty powers, who judge according to other
laws than his, which he does not understand and never can
understand, faced with which he is lost, and only thrown un¬
conditionally on God’s mercy—the old problem of Job—while
underlining then the position of human freedom in the case
of Kafka, I do not of course wish to forget that this attitude
of Kafka’s is only an occasional flash, and that passages which
describe man as powerless, crowd in on the reader in an
overwhelming majority. But the propositions of freedom and
hope are there, too! And if only one such proposition is found,
in a religious thinker, it has the remarkable quality of de¬
cisively changing the whole picture of him. That’s all I want
to say, no more. These dispositions towards a more optimistic
interpretation must not be neglected if one wants to read
Kafka properly. In fact I think that just these gentle disposi-
171
tions, wrung from all the endless bad moods and failures of
a horribly difficult life, dispositions towards a fight for the
good against anything and everything,” form the kernel, the
best and the most characteristic part of Kafka’s attitude as
a thinker. Just because the dispositions to faith were won
from such a radical skepticism, they are in their truthfulness,
refined by the ultimate tests, infinitely valuable and pow¬
erful.
“Man cannot live without a permanent faith in something
indestructible in himself,” says Kafka. And adds, At the
same time this indestructible part and his faith in it may re¬
main permanently concealed from him.” Very significant is
the following minor proposition which rejects the theism of
the ordinary religious observance: “One of the forms in
which this concealment may be expressed is the belief in a
personal God.” One might well say that skepticism and faith
cannot be more intimately wedded than in this aphorism.
Kafka disputes with God as Job once did. He disputes
about original sin, and Paradise Lost. He seeks, but fails to
find the definitive word. He seeks a faith “like a guillotine,
as heavy, and as light.” But one thing he has become as¬
sured of in any case; quite independently of how we may
judge God’s attitude towards us—the attitude and the task of
mankind is clear, it is activity in the service of the good so
far as it is discernible by us. “Death is in front of us, rather
like a picture of the battle of Alexander on the wall in the
classroom. The point is to blur or even wipe out the picture
by our deeds while we are still in this life.”
Compare with this an entry in the diary dated 11/11/1911
—to my feeling one of the most moving entries: “As soon as I
perceive in any way that I have allowed evil conditions, for
the removal of which I am really the right person, to go on
their own sweet way—for example the extremely satisfied,
but from my point of view desperate, life of Mrs. N.—for a
moment I lose the feel of the muscles of my arms.” There is
a similar passage, May 1914, which reveals, however, a
stronger emphasis on the limitlessness and complicated na¬
ture of all mortal things, which indeed so endlessly lead the
172
fight for the good into false paths (one could say, every
great writer has made some facet of life clear, that no one
had seefi so clearly before him. And what has become clear
through Kafka? The unclearness of lifel):
“If I am not very much mistaken, I am getting nearer. It
is as though there were a spiritual fight in a clearing in some
wood. I penetrate into the wood, don’t find anything, and
through weakness, hasten out of it again; often when I am
leaving the wood, I hear, or think I hear, the clash of the
weapons of those fighters. Perhaps the fighters’ looks seek
me through the darkness of the wood, but I know only so
little and such deceptive things about them.”
Man’s bewilderment is great. And yet, and yet—we let the
“chariot,” God’s chariot, and the chariot of the good life, pass
us by without getting in; one misses it only when one does
not take things seriously. “Hold fast!” says that meditation
which I believe to be the conclusive one. “. . . then you too
will see the unchangeable, dark distance, out of which noth¬
ing can come except one day the chariot; it rolls up, gets
bigger and bigger, fills the whole world at the moment it
reaches you—and you sink into it like a child sinking into the
upholstery of a carriage that drives through storm and
night.”
Kafka’s fundamental outlook may be summarized in some
such formula as this: almost everything is uncertain, but
once one has a certain degree of understanding one never
loses the way any more. It is Plato’s doctrine in its purest
form. For Plato, too, assures us in Phaedrus that for those
who have once trodden the upper path, it is not ordained
that they shall fall back to the lower one.

For all his mourning over the imperfection and intrans¬

parency of human actions, Kafka was convinced that there
were truths which could not be assailed. He did not express
this in words, but he did so by his whole behavior all his life.
It was for that reason that in spite of all the depression he
exuded, one felt infinitely well in his company. The “In¬
destructible” made its presence felt, Kafka’s unobtrusively
173
quiet but firm behavior was at the same time a pledge for
the everlasting laws of love, reason, and kindness. He was
admittedly limitlessly skeptical and ironic. But there was,
for instance, for him no skepticism about the substance and
heart of Goethe. Well then, after all not “limitlessly skepti¬
cal”? No, the limit was there—a very distant limit, but a
limit nevertheless.
Belief in an absolute world—but we go astray, we are too
weak, we do not grasp it. Next to his belief in the Absolute
stands for Kafka his consciousness of human insufficiency.
This feeling of weakness Schoeps explains by the special
situation of the Jew today, who does not follow the tradi¬
tional law of his religion. There is also an explanation from
the Catholic side; the Jew who does not accept Christ. But
as a motive in this feeling of weakness, we must not forget
Kafka’s many private, accidental failings and sufferings, be¬
ginning with his youthful impressions and the “education
that went wrong”; they all condition the feeling of God’s
“farness” which expresses itself so insistently in his works.
Through this one grasps real life and truth better than
through theological interpretations. “To be near God” and
“to live rightly” were identical for Kafka. As a member of a
race without a country one cannot live properly. This almost
realistically Jewish interpretation of Kafka, in which Zionism
is accepted as a way of life of almost religious relevance, I
shall endeavor to develop later on.
But let us first establish the general religious side.
The Absolute is there—but it is incommensurable with the
life of man—this would seem to be a fundamental experience
of Kafka’s. From the depth of his experiences it takes on ever
new variations; in the bitterest irony, in despair, in unex¬
ampled self-abasement, and in a tender hope that sings
through all his savage skepticism, not often, but all the more
unmistakably, here and there. The chief theme remains the
enormous danger that we may lose the right way, a danger
so grotesquely out of proportion that it is really only an acci¬
dent—^“gratia praeveniens”—that can bring us to the point of
entering into “The Law,” i.e. the right and perfect life, into
174
“Tao.” How much more probable it is, on the contrary, that
we miss the way altogether. “Once you have followed the
false alarm of the night-bell—you can never put it right
again.” The eternal misunderstanding between God and man
induces Kafka to represent this disproportion again and
again in the picture of two worlds which can never, never
understand one another—hence the infinite separation be¬
tween dumb animals and men is one of his chief themes in
the numerous animal stories which his works contain, not by
accident. The same is true of the partition wall between father
and son. This writer’s gaze rests with the endless pity of
understanding on everything that expresses incommensur¬
ability, and brings it into silent relation with the most fatal
and greatest of all misunderstandings, the failure of man in
the sight of God.
This perception undoubtedly has its kernel in the feeling
that there is a world of the Absolute, Freedom from sin. Per¬
fection—that is that which the faithful call “God.” This feel¬
ing for the “Indestructible” was for Kafka an immediate
certainty, at the same time—equipped as he was with the
sharpest of eyes of the soul—he did not overlook a single one
of the countless, wretched backslidings, not one of the sins,
not one of the absurdities with which men embitter each
other’s lives, make each other’s lives impossible indeed, and
which cause them to wander farther and farther away from
the fountain of life. A good life is prescribed for us, but we
are incapable, through faults in our innermost being, of com¬
prehending this life. For this reason the divine world be¬
comes for us a transcendental territory, and in the truest
sense of the words, strange, uncanny. To our ears the will
of God sounds illogical, that is to say opposed to our human
logic in a grotesque fashion. Since the Book of Job in the
Bible, God has never been so savagely striven with as in
Kafka’s The Trial, and The Castle, or in his In the Penal
Colony, in which justice is presented in the image of a ma¬
chine thought out with refined cruelty, an inhuman, almost
devilish machine, and a crank who worships this machine.
Tust the same in the Book of Job, God does what seems ab-
175
 surd and unjust to man. But it is only to man that this seems
so, and the final conclusion arrived at in Job as in Kafka is
the confirmation of the fact that the yardstick by which man
works is not that by which measurements are taken in the
world of the Absolute. Is that agnosticism? No; for the funda¬
mental feeling remains that in some mysterious way man is
nevertheless connected with the transcendental kingdom of
God. Only the usual, flat, rationally understandable kind of
connection it just isn’t. And the terrible wound of doubt that
Kafka’s ever-fresh wit, and Kafka’s ever freshly creating, bi¬
zarre fancy, deal our moral system, cannot be healed by
phrases, by sanctimoniously lifting up one’s eyes, and patch¬
ing things up with evil, not by belletristic anointings, but
only by a tremendous, mounting feeling for the positive that
dares bid defiance to all this undisguised negation. To have
registered the negative and fearfully defective sides of na¬
ture without veiling them in any way, and yet at the same
time to have seen continually from the depths of his heart
the “World of Ideas,” in the Platonic sense—that was the
distinguishing feature of Kafka’s life and of his works, that
was the thing that proclaimed itself to his friends, without a
word being said about it, as a kind of revelation, peace, cer¬
tainty, in the midst of the storm of suffering and uncertainty.
Perhaps there have been men who have had a deeper,
that is to say, a less questioning faith than Kafka’s—perhaps
also there have been men with even more biting skepticism—
that I don’t know. But what I do know is the unique fact that
in Kafka these two contradictory qualities blossomed out into
a synthesis of the highest order. One might gather its im¬
portance into this sentence: Of all believers he was the freest
from illusions, and among all those who see the world as it is,
without illusions, he was the most unshakable believer.
It is the old question of Job. But Kafka stands almost com¬
pletely on the side of man. That is how it is in the story, “Be¬
fore the Law.” The doorkeeper has deceived the man who
demands admission, or he is too simple. To close the argu¬
ment, K., to whom the legend is related, says, “It turns lying
into a universal principle.” It is true that that is also not
176
the last word. The priest argues against it, protests by word
and deed. Thus the justice of the highest court (in his novel
The Trial), the possibility of a good life in accordance with
the divine command, “The Law” in fact, is not denied—but
this possibility is not a certainty. Everything remains hanging
in the air. Darkness and light hold the scales against one
another. In what time is this “timeless” novel set? One minute
before the creation of the world. Will it succeed, or not? A
terrible fear of doubt, of uncertainty, fills one’s heart.
What is the reason? Why man does not achieve the real,
the true, that, with the best will in the world, he wanders
from the path like that country doctor who followed the
“false alarm of the night-bell”? Kafka, by the very nature
of his being, was not inclined to give any promises, or
any directions for the happy life. He admired everyone who
could—he himself remained in suspense. But just this sus¬
pense would have been empty and bare, had he not felt the
Absolute as something inexpressible (apQryrov) in himself.
In his uncertainty one felt a distant certainty, through which
alone this uncertainty is made possible and preserved. I have
already said that this positive trait appears perhaps less
strongly in his writings—and that is why they have been
found depressing by many readers—than it was to be felt in
his personal calm and serenity, in the gentle, considered,
never hasty, character of his being. But also he who reads
Kafka’s works with care must again and again catch a
glimpse through the dark husk of this kernel that gleams, or
rather beams gently through. On the top lie distraction, and
despair in that which is related—but the ease and minuteness
of detail with which it is related, the “copy fever” which is in
love with detail, that is, with real life, and with descriptions
true to nature, the humor in the compressed structure of his
sentences, which often has the effect of a short circuit, in so
many tricks of style—the debtors “have become extravagant,
and are giving a party in the garden of some inn, and others
are breaking their flight to America for a little while to attend
the party’’-all this points, already through the form alone, to
the “indestructible” in Kafka and in the human-being-in-
general that he recognizes.
When Kafka read aloud himself, this humor became par¬
ticularly clear. Thus, for example, we friends of his laughed
quite immoderately when he first let us hear the first chapter
of The Trial. And he himself laughed so much that there
were moments when he couldn’t read any further. Astonish¬
ing enough, when you think of the fearful earnestness of this
chapter. But that is how it was.
Certainly it was not entirely good, comfortable laughter.
But the ingredients of a good laugh were also there—along¬
side the hundred ingredients of uncanniness, which I shall
not try to minimize. I am only pointing out the fact that is
otherwise so easily forgotten in studies of Kafka—the streak
of joy in the world and in life.
What he reproached himself with was, in fact, just that his
belief in life wavered, that life was not strong enough in him.
And he admired the things of the country, an admiration
expressed as early as in his (unpublished) youthful letter to
Oskar Poliak: “Have you already noticed how the soil comes
up to meet the cow as she is grazing, how intimately it comes
up to meet her? Have you already noticed how heavy, rich,
arable earth crumbles at the touch of fingers which are all
too fine, how solemnly it crumbles?” It is still more clearly
expressed in the diary he kept of his stay in Ziirau, which
says among other things, “General impressions of the farm¬
ers: noblemen, who have found salvation in their farming,
where they have arranged their work so cleverly and humbly
that it fits without omission into the whole, and will keep
them safe from every wavering and sea-sickness until their
happy death. Real citizens of the earth.” But naturally his
admiration did not stay confined to country folk alone. He
writes in just the same style, 10/20/1913, in his diary, about
a completely urban author, who was sure of his path: “Have
just been reading the case of Jacobsohn. This strength to live,
to make decisions, to set one’s foot with joy in the right spot.
He sits in himself as a first-class oarsman sits in his own boat,
and would sit in any boat.”
178
 The scale of values that Kafka applied becomes clear from
notes such as that. He loved an efficient vitality, but only one
which stood at the service of what is good and constructive.
(A twofold demand hard to satisfy!) He always found fault
with himself for “never having learned anything useful.” He
complains in his diary, 10/25/1921, that “the current of life
has never caught me up, and that I never broke away from
Prague, was never put on to any game or trade.” He often
reproaches himself with coldness, incapacity for life, lifeless¬
ness, as we frequently find in his letters, and in the last chap¬
ter of The Trial. The two black mysterious bailiffs only carry
out a sentence that has already been carried out. As they lead
K. away, they form together with him “one unit, such as al¬
most only lifeless matter can form.” He is dead already: that
is to say, dead to real life. That is the real reason why the
ghostly appearance of Fraulein Biirstner has such a paralyz¬
ing effect on him. He wants to see her, not because he prom¬
ises himself any help from doing so, but “in order not to forget
the warning that she holds for him.” K. had not married, re¬
mained a bachelor, had allowed himself to be terrified by the
reality of life, had not defended himself against it—that is his
secret guilt, which had already, before his condemnation,
shut him out from the circle of life. “There would be nothing
heroic about it if he did resist,” is therefore the final con¬
clusion: “if he were now to make difficulties for the gentlemen
[the bailiffs], if he tried now by defending himself to enjoy
the last appearance of life.” K. died of weakness in living, is
already dead from the beginning of the book—from the mo¬
ment of the arrest, which Kafka must have written in a kind
of trance, in a moment of clairvoyance, or did there exist
then, in 1914, the tight-fitting black uniforms with buckles,
pockets, buttons, and belt? Admittedly weakness is a relative
idea, and if you translate the novel back into the autobiog¬
raphical from which it came, then one must not forget that
Kafka’s life can only be considered as tainted with weakness
when measured by the heroically moral, in fact monumental
demands he made on himself. But what would not be weak¬
ness in this case? A feeling of this comes to life in the unbear-
179
ably moving passage at the end of The Trial, where “the re¬
sponsibility for this last misdoing” is thrust off, where K.
rears up, reaches after a far-away, unknown, indistinct per¬
son. “Who was it? A friend? A good man? Someone who sym¬
pathized? A man who wanted to help? Was it an individual?
Was it everybody? Was there still help? Were there objec¬
tions one had forgotten to raise? Surely there were some.
Logic is, of course, unshakable, but it cannot withstand a man
who wishes to live. Where was the judge he had never seen?
Where was the high court before which he had never ap¬
peared?”
The old problem of Job.
Kafka’s fundamental principle: pity for mankind that finds
it so hard a task to do what is right. Pity, half-smiling, half¬
weeping pity. Not the fulminating excommunication of the
“theology of the crisis” which knows so exactly where man¬
kind has gone wrong.
Kafka’s demands on himself were the most severe. Almost
never did he believe he had come up to them. On the other
hand, he was no “cultural critic” in the accepted sense of the
word. For very much of what went on around him, many
quite ordinary people he came into touch with seemed to him
self-contained, admirable for their achievements and their
strength, in fact absolutely blessed by God. In this there was
a certain amount of truth, inasmuch as no one was so bum-
ingly conscious of the “distance from God” as he was. But in
this consciousness of the distance, Kafka, in his humility, saw
no virtue, but only uncertainty, that is, weakness. But as it
was a preliminary condition of all life to feel the distance
from God—from the perfection of a right way of life—clearly
and without any veiling of ritual or mysticism, his praise and
his admiration of the everyday man—the “pedestrian” as
Kierkegaard describes him—often involved an extremely ten¬
der, unintentional, playful and at the same time touching
irony. He gave the preference Actively to the victors of every¬
day life, simply out of the kindness of the superfluity of his
wealth: “They know about the abyss as well as I do—and
yet they balance gaily over it.” But did they really know? The
180
joking hypothesis of the premise loosened up the personal
tragedy of his life—was one of the roots of his entirely unique
humor.
So Kafka’s attitude is related to Job’s attitude, and yet in
many points is a quite different one. I cannot, as Schoeps and
Margarethe Susmann do, trace this difference back in essen¬
tials to the historical difference between the stage of de¬
velopment of the Jewish race at that time and now.
In the first place the fact that Job from the very beginning
appears a perfectly just man to others as well as to himself,
whereas Kafka—with the reservations I have just made above
—considers himself as a particularly imperfect one, demands
a different approach to the problem.
In the question and charge laid against God, they are, it is
true, at one with each other. It is the experience of incom¬
mensurability that is common to them both. The world of
God’s justice, and the world of human ethics gape wide
asunder—the space for Kierkegaard’s “Fear and Trembling”
is created. Or as Kafka once expressed it in his diary: “It is
not really and completely wicked for a tubercular man to
have children. Flaubert’s father was tubercular. The choice:
either the child’s lungs go for a penny whistle—very fine
expression for the music the doctor puts his ear to the
patient’s chest to listen for—or it becomes a Flaubert. The
trembling of the father while counsel is taken in empty
space.” Plumb the terrible hopelessness that lies in the
phrase, “counsel is taken in empty space.” It reminds one of
that old demoniac hymn, which Kafka surely did not know,
“sederunt principesIn the same way, Job does not mince
matters; when he strives with God no expression is too strong
for reviling God.
Job ix. 11-19. “Lo, he goeth by me, and I see him not: he
passeth on also, but I perceive him not.
“Behold, he taketh away, who can hinder him? Who will
say unto him, What dost thou?
“If God will not withdraw his anger, the proud helpers do
stoop under him.
181
 “How much less shall I answer him, and choose out my
words to reason with him?
“Whom, though I were righteous, yet would I not answer,
but I would make supplication to my judge.
“If I had called, and he had answered me; yet would I not
believe that he had hearkened unto my voice.
“For he breaketh me with a tempest, and multiplieth my
wounds without cause.
“He will not suffer me to take my breath, but filleth me
with bitterness.
“If I speak of strength, lo, he is strong: and if of judgment,
who shall set me a time to plead?”
That is exactly the same judge to whom K., in The Trial,
cannot fight his way: or again, the gentlemen of the Castle,
who don’t allow themselves to be spoken to, who always put
forward a screen of courts of appeal which have no respon¬
sibility and which do very wicked things.
In the Book of Job:
“If the scourge slay suddenly, he will laugh at the trial of
the innocent.
“The earth is given into the hand of the wicked: he cov-
ereth the faces of the judges thereof; if not, where, and who
is he?
“If I wash myself with snow water, and make my hands
never so clean;
“Yet shalt thou plunge me in the ditch, and mine own
clothes shall abhor me.
“For he is not a man, as I am, that I should answer him, and
we should come together in judgment.
“Neither is there any daysman betwixt us, that might lay
his hand upon us both.
“Let him take his rod away from me, and let not his fear
terrify me:
“Then would I speak, and not fear him; but it is not so with
»
me.
The solution in the Book of Job comes about later through
God’s answer out of the whirlwind, “Where wast thou when
I laid the foundations of the Earth?” But thereby only the
182
heteronomy between God and man is strengthened. Thereby
divine right would be differentiated from human right toto
coelo. To cap everything the Book of Job ends with a hymn¬
like description of two beasts, two monsters, “Behemoth and
that Leviathan whose beauty, so completely removed from
humanity, is praised. “He maketh a path to shine after him;
one would think the deep to be hoary—He is a king over all
the children of pride.” Really magnificent. But the paradox
that God’s yardstick is not man’s remains unanswered. By
human standards, God appears to be unjust—the wound re¬
mains. Job, it is true, finds some way of accommodating him¬
self to this “Beyond Good and Evil.”
Not so Kafka. His charge, at the same time, goes one step
further than Job’s, although one might think that were hardly
possible. This is the step: “Behemoth and that Leviathan”
have no ethics that man can fathom, but they are praised in
an aesthetic sense, as God’s works, magnificent to look at in
their strength. Now with Kafka the “Court” is, in addition,
dirty, ridiculous, despicable, corrupt; it sits in rooms in a
suburb, works in a stupidly bureaucratic way, is treated in
fact as aesthetically inferior. The intention of both writers is,
of course, the same. The heteronomy of God is to be de¬
scribed-something that cannot be measured by men’s stand¬
ards. So far efforts have been made to describe this heter¬
onomy solely by an endless exaggeration in the direction of
the positive side: more light than one can imagine, greater,
stronger than is bearable by human powers of comprehen¬
sion. Kafka makes comprehensible the difference in kind of
the perfect world, by fitting it out with negative character¬
istics. Already, with Job, the world of God—as that of his
monsters—is radically opposed to the world of man, but it is
at least on the grand scale. With Kafka it is seen besides to
be petty, rough, trashy—this too is only a symbol for its being
different, its being opposed. The world of perfection seems
so disgusting to man; man is just forming a wrong judgment,
that is all. This fact is thereby expressed with the boldest
consistency—and the world of perfection remains, of course,
for all this deliberately abusive picture of it, just as un-
183
affected, just as fundamentally incapable of being affected,
with Kafka as with Job.
But Job comforts himself with the idea that God and man
cannot be brought to the same levels. Kafka, however, does
not comfort himself. And that shuts him out of the line Job—
Kierkegaard—theology of the crisis. That brings him back
to the Jewish creed, in one sentence of which, “Our God
is one God,” I see the strongest spell against all attempts to
attribute to God ethical laws fundamentally different from
those of mankind. God, the world of perfection, of the
Platonic “highest good,” is under the same laws as we are,
our morality runs towards this goal, without, it is true, our
being able to comprehend the goal; but the path that leads
to it we can comprehend, and we refuse to recognize any
heathen-divine nature-ethic, which would really be heter-
onomous to it. In that probably lies the deepest ground for
the commandment in the Bible that we may not make our¬
selves any image of God. The theology of the crisis—in fact,
Job already—Kierkegaard’s Abraham-conception already—
easily fall into the danger of deducing an unmoral or
nature-moral God from the difference in kind between God
and man, between the perfect and the finite, to imagine God
as a negro fetish that bares its teeth. But, “Thou shalt not
make any graven image.” Even Behemoth and that Leviathan
do not say the last word on the nature of God. God did create
man “in His own image”—the humane teaching of the Old
Testament to which the great Thomas Aquinas found the
way back after the pessimistic errors of Augustine: Sig-
natum est super nos lumen vultus Tui, Domine. Thus, too,
Kafka sees no heteronomy between God and man, but only
indistinctness, an admittedly almost desperate complication,
caused by intermediate courts full of malice and poison,
which thrust their way bureaucratically between, and con¬
tinually hinder the Good.
In spite of all these intermediate courts which take up so
much room in his writings, in fact sometimes rob life of all
its pleasure, he writes sentences like the following, which
184
are full of hope and love, full of a comfort born at a heavy
cost through a thousand sufferings:
“It is not a denial of the premonition of a final delivery
when the imprisonment remains still unchanged the next
day, or is even made more severe, or even if it is expressly
stated that it will never come to an end. All that can be,
much rather, the necessary basis for a final delivery.”
“He is of the opinion one has only once to find the way
over to the Good, and one is immediately saved, without pay¬
ing any attention to the past, and even without paying any
attention to the future.”
Kafka saw the world of the Absolute before him, not be¬
yond redemption, and not barred to us. Hope—for us, too!
That he once expressed the opposite opinion is not conclusive
enough to counterbalance the many “entries” into the Abso¬
lute which he recognized over and over again, and which I
have taken it on me to describe in this biography as possibil¬
ities, which frequently recurred, of the right profession, the
right marriage, and so on. For it seems to me that just this is
the most important point in the presentation of a man who is
motivated by religion; to point out the cramp irons that this
man recognizes between the visibly finite world and the
perfect world that lies beyond, to show where they are to be
found, whether he has perhaps denied them altogether, and
avoided them, or has only accidentally missed them, but in
principle knows them and has striven to get at them, to ex¬
perience them.

On March 15, 1922, Franz read me the beginning of The

Castle.1
1 He used to come to Prague, at this time, only temporarily and for
short periods. In 1919 he lived for a few months in Schelesen near
Liboch, at Stiidl’s boarding-house; alone at first, then in winter with me.
A second unhappy tale of love and betrothal began there, but came to
a speedy end. He wrote the “Letter to My Father. His stay in Meran
falls in the year 1920, as well as a love affair that went very hopefully
for a short time. Many letters from this period are extant. That winter
he tried to find in the Tatra Mountains, in a sanatorium at Tatrankse
Mathary, a cure for his illness, which was becoming more and more
acute, and sometimes led to the severest crises. There he found a friend
185
 In The Castle an exhaustive description is given of how a
certain type of man reacts to the world, and in so far as every
man feels an element of this type in himself—exactly in the
same way that Faust, or Don Quixote, or Julien Sorel is
hidden in each of us, whether it be as a predisposition, as a
yearning, or as a component part of the ego—so Kafka’s
Castle, for all the individuality of the character it describes,
is a book in which everyone recognizes his own experiences.
Kafka’s hero, whom he calls simply K., in autobiographical
fashion, passes through life alone. He is the loneliness-com¬
ponent in us, which this novel works out in more-than-life-
size, terrifying clarity. But at the same time it is a very spe¬
cial nuance of loneliness that is treated—and this, too, we
know deep down in ourselves, feel it sometimes in quiet
moments rising to the surface. K., namely, is a man of good
will through and through; he doesn’t wish for his loneliness,
and is not proud of it, but would gladly be an active member
of human society, would like to play his part in an honest
way, would like to fit in; he strives after a useful career, wants
to marry, wants to found a family. But everything goes wrong
with him. One notices more and more clearly that the chilly
layer of isolation that surrounds K. is nothing accidental—it
is also no accident that the old-established inhabitants of the
village in which K. had wrought a dwelling-place for himself
shut themselves up against him, and that in his efforts to find
contacts he hits upon just that family of farmers which is
spurned by all the others. But the riddle as to why K. cannot
make himself at home is not solved. He is a stranger, and has
struck a village in which strangers are looked upon with
suspicion. More is not said. One feels at once that this is the

in Dr. Robert Klopstock, a fellow-patient and a doctor. He coughed a

great deal, suffered from high temperature and shortness of breath—
Kafka, whose beautifully constructed phrases and magnificent sen¬
tences are distinguished by such long breaths. In the same way cruel
nature let Beethoven and Smetana grow deaf, and many a painter go
blind—just the organ which has been best developed is destroyed. Of
the exact period in which Kafka wrote The Castle, I cannot inform my
readers. Only the date of its first reading aloud is fixed on the evidence
of my diary—it is probably not far from the beginning of his writing it.
186
general feeling of strangeness among men, only it has just
been made concrete in this one special case. “Nobody can be
the companion of anyone here.” One can take this making-
concrete a step further. It is the special feeling of a Jew who
would like to take root in foreign surroundings, who tries
with all the powers of his soul to get nearer to the strangers,
to become one of them entirely—but who does not succeed in
thus assimilating himself.
The word Jew does not appear in The Castle. Yet, tangibly,
Kafka in The Castle, straight from his Jewish soul, in a simple
story, has said more about the situation of Jewry as a whole
today than can be read in a hundred learned treatises. At the
same time this specifically Jewish interpretation goes hand
in hand with what is common to humanity, without either
excluding or even disturbing the other. The general religious
interpretation I have endeavored to give in the appendix to
the published version of the novel. Here are a few pointers on
the relation between the novel and the lot of the Jews.
The first meeting with the farmers is immediately char¬
acteristic. K. has got lost in this village that is strange to him.
He is tired. He sees an old peasant. “May I come in for a
while?” asks K. The peasant mumbles something indistinctly.
Immediately K. takes this as an invitation and enters the
cottage. Later it turns out that the person who let him in is
weak in the head. The remarkable legal claim on which the
Jews in the Diaspora built up their “right to settle” occurs to
one as a parallel, when one has entered into the spirit of this
half-accidental “tolerance” which K. claims. It is very much
the same a few pages before that. K. has asked the extremely
unfriendly schoolmaster whether he could come and see him
some time. The schoolmaster’s answer is, “I live in Swan
Street, at the butcher’s.” The author comments, “That was, it
is true, rather giving an address than an invitation,” but
nevertheless K. says, “Very well, I shall come.” Already in
this little introductory scene one sees the position of the
“gentiles” with their calm rejection, and that of the Jew with
his obligatory friendliness, pushfulness, indeed importunity,
described with shatteringly objective melancholy. This is a
peculiarity of Kafka’s style: melancholy which seems to force
itself out from an objective—not a subjective—arbitrariness.
But let us get on! In the cottage K. is shown immediately
that he is not at all welcome to the people in it: that he is
disturbing them in the middle of very intimate household
tasks—washing the floors and the clothes, feeding a baby. At
a pinch, they allow him to sleep there a little. Then he is
bowed out. A “silent, slow-thinking man, broad-built, and
with a broad face too,” comes up to him. “You can’t stay
here.” The Jew is not always thrown out rudely or on legal
quibbles. But the thing goes with the inevitability of a law
of nature, without passion, under compulsion. “We don’t
want any visitors.” K. appeals to the fact that they had in¬
vited him, that he is going to have a proper post here as a
land surveyor. Whether there is any truth in this story of an
invitation, or whether K. only imagines it, that is the point
on which the whole novel really turns—here again the paral¬
lel with the Jewish problem is easy to sense. Now, in this
first chapter the simple man of the people gives the provi¬
sional answer which more or less corresponds to the attitude
of instinctive anti-Semitism: “[Whether they want you] . . .
that I don’t know. If you’ve been asked to come, then you’re
probably needed, that is an exception, but we, we little peo¬
ple, stick to the rule, and that you can’t blame us for.” K. tries
still to get quickly into conversation with a girl who is in the
room, but “at once K. had one of the men on each side of him,
dragging him towards the door, silently, but with all their
strength, as though there was no other way of making him
understand. The old man was pleased about something or
other as this took place, and clapped his hands. Even the
washerwoman was laughing with the children, who were
suddenly yelling like mad things.” The scene, which is the
eternal fate of Jews, sounds like a very impartial rewriting
of the saying, “It doesn’t matter, the Jew will be burned.”
Arguments have no place in the debate about Jews which
the world conducts with us: “Silently, as if there was no other
way of making him understand.”
The hostile village splits itself up for Kafka into two strata
188
—the village, and the castle that dominates it. In order to
settle in the village, he needed permission from the castle.
But the castle barred itself against him, in the same way that
the peasants turned their backs on him. The castle, in the
peculiar symbolic language of the novel, stands for divine
guidance, the village and its peasants stand for “Mother
Earth.” For women attract K.—through them he hopes to get
an entrance into the families and to find firm ground under
his feet. In just the same way his work is a connection with
the earth, a taking-root. As soon as the prospect of a girl
from the place and of a job opens up for him, he thinks he
has won the game, and he lulls himself with the dream that
he will be able to walk about among the people of the village
“indistinguishable” from them. The whole passage breathes
the illusionary spirit of the psychology of assimilation: “Only
as a village laborer, removed as far away as possible from the
gentlemen of the castle would he be in a position to achieve
anything in the castle. These people who were still so suspi¬
cious of him would begin to speak to him when he had be¬
come, not of course their friend, but still their fellow-citizen,
and once he was undistinguishable from Gerstacker or Lase-
mann—and that would have to happen very quickly, every¬
thing depended on that—then all paths would be opened to
him at one stroke, and so on.” K.’s reflections follow the
familiar lines: to reach God through the community, out of
the coalescence with a natural form of life to draw religious
strength. But K. might very well be able to explain this mys¬
tery rationally—to live it to the depths (in these strange sur¬
roundings) he was not able. “I have been here quite a long
time and am already feeling a little deserted,” he complains
to the schoolmaster. “To the peasants I don’t belong and to
the castle I don’t either, I suppose.” “Between the peasants
and the castle there is no difference,” the schoolmaster cor¬
rects him. And that, too, again sounds like a paraphrase of a
well-known saying, a saying of the Psalms, “How can we
sing the Lord’s song in a strange land!”
The difference between K. and the natives in the passage
given below displays the familiar features. On all sides the
189
Jew comes up against the old customs—he becomes a nui¬
sance without wishing to be one—at the same time he has the
feeling he knows everything better than the people on the
spot, he would like to make the whole thing simple, more
practical than they do, but they, in their incredible self-will,
remain unapproachable. In numerous scenes Kafka shows
with superior irony what unsuspected powers of resistance
the outmoded and distorted arrangements of the village
and the castle develop to oppose the intruder. “You are not
from the village, you are nothing. But unfortunately you are
something after all, a stranger, a person who is superfluous,
and always in the way, a person for whose sake one has con¬
tinual vexation, a person whose intentions are obscure—for all
that I don’t in fact at bottom reproach you. You are what you
are. I have seen too much in my life already not to be able to
bear the sight of this, too. But now just think what you are
really asking for.... You have been in the place a day or two,
and already you think you know everything better than the
people who live here. I am not saying that it isn’t possible
once in a while to get something done even in the teeth of
every rule and tradition, but then it certainly doesn’t come
about in the way you are going on, by saying no all the time,
and sticking to your own opinions.”
It is the same thing with the chairman of the parish coun¬
cil, who expresses his fundamental dislike of K. in a slightly
different tone, but just as conclusively. “You were engaged
as a surveyor, but we have no work for you here.. .. Nobody
is keeping you here, but, after all, that is not throwing you
out. . . . Who would dare to throw you out. Land Surveyor?
The lack of clarity of the preliminary questions already guar¬
antees you polite treatment. Only, to all appearances, you
are over-sensitive.”
In the long history of the sufferings of Jewry, we have
heard all these notes before. K. comes to grief in the most
pitifully ridiculous way, despite the fact that he went at
everything so earnestly and conscientiously. He remains
alone. Over all the painful situations this novel takes us
through, over all the undeserved misery hangs, invisibly
190
 visible, the motto, “This is not the way to do things. A new, a
quite different way of taking root must be sought.”
In a still unpublished fragment from the year 1914, Kafka
describes this fundamental feeling still more sharply. “I came
once in summer, towards evening, to a village where I had
never been before,” is the opening sentence of a short story
that covers fourteen quarto pages, but is then, alas! broken
off. “On every side in front of the farmhouses one saw old
and lofty trees. It was after a shower; the air blew fresh, I was
so well pleased with everything.” A door in the wall is
opened. The children of the tenant farmer were peeping out
to see who was passing by so late in the night. The narrator
is startled, but is given information by a passer-by. “To a
stranger everything may easily seem odd,” he apologized,
with a smile. The narrator would like to stay the night in the
village, looks for an inn, is under observation. The man he
first spoke to says to his wife, “I just want to see what this
man is going to do here. He is a stranger. He is running around
here in a quite unnecessary way. Just watch!” And Kafka
goes on: “He was talking about me as if I were deaf, or didn’t
understand his language.” An uncanny conversation follows
with the married couple. The stranger is given a night’s lodg¬
ing in their house. Everything takes place in an atmosphere
of half, or complete, unexpressed hostility. “If putting me up
gives you even the faintest trouble, then tell me so frankly,
I am not at all insistent on the point. I shall go to the inn; it’s
all the same to me.” “He talks such a lot,” said the woman
softly. “It could only be meant as an insult; well, they answer
my politeness with insults then; but she is an old woman, I
can’t defend myself. And it was just this defenselessness per¬
haps that was the reason why this remark of the woman’s
which I could not answer back had a much greater effect on
me than it deserved. I felt some kind of justification for some
kind of fault found with me, not for the reason that I had
spoken too much, for really I had said only what was abso¬
lutely necessary, but for some separate reasons which
touched my existence very nearly.” Finally there is a descrip¬
tion of how the stranger, without wanting to, disturbs the
191
children in their sleep by his clumsiness and misunderstand¬
ing, turns the whole house upside down.
The negative aspect of the Jewish problem, the indefensi¬
bility of the Jewish position is also demonstrated in the story,
“Josephine the Songstress—or The Mice-Nation,” the last
finished work of Kafka’s, and one which he himself destined
for the printing press. To what particular people this picture
of the baited, helpless host of mice most nearly refers need
not be expressly stated. How the vanity of the star, of the
literary man, of the leading “personality” asserts itself even
in the midst of the deepest anguish of the people: this ex¬
tremely ironical presentation of the protagonist who believes
the world has waited for him alone, for his word of salvation
that he and only he could utter, unhappily applies also to a
phenomenon which is particularly common just in the Jewish
factional and the Jewish literary world—the man who thinks
that he alone was chosen, and with sneering superiority dis¬
misses as unimportant, or hardly takes any notice of, anything
that anybody else advises, does, or says. (Kafka himself is an
example of the opposite type, that is, modest and humble,
and has none of those “gestures of a savior” about him. He
went, or so I think, almost too far in this direction. It is open
to argument how far the unfavorable conditions of his life
were responsible for his occasional self-depreciation and
whether without it he would not have risen to the rank of a
great, historically effective prophet of true religiosity.) Don’t
misunderstand me! The position of the helpless mice is
simultaneously that of weak humanity in the battle against
the demons of Evil. The vain prophet is to be found among
other peoples too. And only in so far as the position of help¬
lessness, as well as of the irresponsible, conscienceless “fa¬
mous man” stands, in the case of the Jews, under the dazzling
searchlight of the distress of the Jewish masses and of the
Jewish soul, is it an especially sharp portrait in miniature, a
symbol of the general sufferings of mankind presented in the
form of a caricature.
In “Josephine,” however, the road leading to a positive solu¬
tion is indicated, and it seems to me not a matter of indiffer-
192
ence that this happens just in the last work Kafka finished.
Josephine the singer defies and hides away from her people,
who have so warmly admired her art, indeed have regarded
it as indispensable, and now the story says, “But the people,
quietly, without showing any disappointment, imperiously,
a mass relying on itself, which even if appearances speak
against it, can absolutely only make gifts, never receive them,
not even from Josephine, goes on in its own way. For Jose¬
phine, however, there can be only the downward path. The
day will soon come when her last squeak has sounded and is
heard no more. She is a tiny episode in the eternal history of
our people, and our people will get over the loss.” The in¬
corporation of the individual in the fate of his people, his
active participation is demanded. The reader of this biog¬
raphy will find sufficient points to show how Kafka, in his
special, Jewish case, tried to find the link with the people.
The last chapter also adds a few indications of this. Of course
Kafka did not believe that a geographical change of address
was sufficient; he regarded a change of heart as equally to be
demanded. Both must be changed, both were equally neces¬
sary. Order in one’s soul—as well as a normalization of the
outward conditions of life.
Now one might ask why Kafka expressed this only in his
diaries and letters, and never expressly in his literary works,
why, as a writer, he expressed himself solely, allegorically or
symbolically, in parables.
First one must recognize the peculiarity of Kafka’s way of
thinking, which went on in images, and not in discourse.
Even in conversation, in a debate, the image prevails. In the
diary, too, the inexpressibly lovely lyric passages—one of
many: “Dreams come along, they come up the river, on a
ladder they climb the quayside. One stops, one talks to them,
they know so much, only where they come from, that they
don’t know... why do you raise your arms instead of folding
them round us?”
Furthermore, one must not confuse “allegory” and “sym¬
bol.” Kafka never is allegorical, but he is symbolical in the
highest sense. An allegory is created when one “says some-
193
thing else” for something. This “something else” in itself is
of little importance. The anchor, which stands for hope, in its
character as an anchor, does not interest us in the least. It is
all the same what color, what shape or what size it is. That is
why, as a pure hieroglyphic sign, it stands so unequivocally,
and sharply silhouetted, for “Hope.” But Andersen’s “Tin
Soldier,” who expresses perhaps a good, patient, loving
heart, and many other things as well, running into infinity,
touches us also through the personal story of himself, the tin
soldier, in all its detail. The tin soldier is no more an allegory,
but a symbol. The symbol stands on both levels at the same
time, on the level which it describes by suggestion, and on
the objective, real level. It unites the two levels in a peculiar
way, and, what the Greek word also expressed, throws them
together mixed up with one another—and this is such a way
that the deeper one penetrates into the individual case with
all its details about the tin soldier, the clearer one sees the
universal. The Marquise von O. deals with faith between
parents and child, but behind it, and high above it stands
the question of faith in general, faith in the order of the
world. Why then did the writer not say straight out the uni¬
versal that he wanted to say? Because it cannot be said to the
end, because it stretches into infinity. In the special case
which he relates the writer gives only the starting point of an
infinite process. Allegory takes the opposite path, presents
the end of such a process, presents it in clear outline as a
plaything—the mark of a tired soul. Symbol on the other
hand is the bursting forth of a soul, is a matter of the tensive
power which allows the individual case to send a ray into the
infinite—and at the same time, according to the point at
which one takes a cross section of the ray, one finds the affairs
of the individual, of the people, or of mankind dealt with.
And all this, too, simultaneously, with the same words, and
in one single situation.
Behind all Kafka’s scenes this infinite vista opens out. But
the scene itself, too, the plain narrative, from which the ray
shines, is full of love of nature and faithful to nature, of fine
observation that is never boring—in this connection one ought
194
perhaps to read—but there are thousands of examples—the
scenes of office life, which have been so thoroughly experi¬
enced, or of the rivalry between the clerks in The Trial. Only
a man who loves life on the deepest foundation tells a tale in
such a way. There is not a word that the presentation does not
lend new color to, not a word that is meaningless—this special
mastery of style is not merely aesthetic, it is a moral phenom¬
enon, it is a result of Kafka’s peculiar honesty. This would
already be a great thing were it only a question of a simple
realistic presentation. But the happenings he describes mean,
with Kafka, himself in the first place, but they mean also at
the same time not only himself. A ray shines out from every
detail, pointing to the eternal, the transcendental, the world of
ideas. In every great work of art one finds the eternal shining
through the mortal forms. In the case of Kafka, however, it
has apart from that become a formal principle of his writing;
One simply cannot any longer separate content from struc¬
ture, so intimately have they united.

195
 CHAPTER VII

THE LAST YEARS

“THERE is no one here who wholly understands me. To

have one person with this understanding, a woman for ex¬
ample, that would be to have a foothold on every side, it
would mean to have God”—this is what Kafka wrote in his
diary in 1915. It seems that this happiness did come his way
at the end of his life, and that the outcome of his fate was
more positive and more full of life than its whole previous
development.
In the summer of 1923, Franz was staying with his sister
and her children in Miiritz, the Baltic seaside resort. There
he chanced upon a holiday colony of the Berlin Jewish Peo¬
ple’s Home, which, founded by Dr. Lehmann, had filled him,
as well as myself, with hope. Right at the beginning of the
work, which has now spread widely and nobly in Palestine,
he took a lively interest in it, and had at one time persuaded
his fiancee F. in Berlin to take part as a voluntary helper in
the work of this Home. Now, many years later, on the beach
he meets children from this Home, plays with them, gets to
know their teacher, goes to social evenings with them. Once
he notices a girl in the Home’s kitchen. She is busy scaling
fish. “Such gentle hands, and such bloody work,” he said
with disapproval. The girl was ashamed, and had some other
work allotted to her.
That was the beginning of his friendship with Dora
Dymant, his life’s companion.
Dora Dymant, who must have been nineteen or twenty at
that time, came from a very much looked-up-to Polish Ortho¬
dox Jewish family. For all the respect she bore her father
whom she loved, she couldn’t stand the constraint, the nar¬
rowness of the tradition—a similar case to that of the actor
Lowy, who combined a great respect for his parents with the
196
realization that he could not continue to follow in their foot¬
steps. Dora escaped from the little Polish town, and found
jobs first in Breslau, then in Berlin, and came to Miiritz in
the employ of the Home. She was an excellent Hebrew
student. Kafka was studying Hebrew with special zeal at that
time—of the papers he left behind, the papers filled with
Hebrew exercises are not much fewer than those covered
with literary works in German.
One of the first conversations between the two ended in
Dora’s reading aloud a chapter from Isaiah in the original
Hebrew. Franz recognized her dramatic talent; on his advice
and under his direction she later educated herself in this
art.
Franz came back from his summer holiday full of high
courage. His decision to cut all ties, get to Berlin, and live
with Dora stood firm—and this time he carried it out in¬
flexibly. At the end of July he left Prague, after offering suc¬
cessful resistance to all his family’s objections. From Berlin
he wrote to me for the first time that he felt happy, and that
he was even sleeping well—an unheard-of novelty in these
last years. He was living with Dora in the suburb of Steglitz,
first of all at 8 Miquel street, at Hermann’s. There was writ¬
ten the comparatively happy story, “A Little Woman.” The
“little woman-judge” who lives her life in constant anger
with her own “ego,” which is really a stranger to her, is none
other than their landlady. She must have put a lot of dif¬
ficulties in the way of the young couple. Six weeks later,
therefore, we find them in 13 Grunewald street with Dr.
Rethberg, a lady doctor, in a villa about whose loveliness
Franz used to rave, although he had only two modest rooms
in it. There I went to see him as often as I came to Berlin-
three times it must have been in all. I found an idyll; at last I
saw my friend in good spirits; his bodily health had got
worse, it is true. Yet for the time it was not even dangerous.
Franz spoke about the demons which had at last let go of
him. “I have slipped away from them. This moving to Berlin
was magnificent, now they are looking for me and can’t find
me, at least for the moment.” He had finally achieved the
197
ideal of an independent life, a home of his own, he was no
longer a son living with his parents, but to a certain extent
himself a paterfamilias. It is obvious that Kafka was not at
all striving after a paradox, an ideal in principle unachievable
—like Kierkegaard, like the “theology of crisis,” but—and
this is the decisive factor—that he wanted an intelligently
fulfilled, good and proper life, that he stood more perhaps
on the side of Martin Buber, who, in rejecting Kierkegaard,
the solitary, from principle, says of living together with a
wife, “Marriage is the exemplary bond, as no other bond
does, it carries us into the great bondage and only as bonds¬
men can we enter into the freedom of the children of God-
yes, woman stands in dangerous rapport with the finite, and
indeed, the finite is the danger, for there is no greater threat
to us than that of remaining tied to it, but just on this danger
is our hope of salvation forged, for it is only over the finite
fulfilled that our human path leads to the infinite” (Buber,
“The Question for the Individual,” 1936). In this sense I saw
Kafka on the right road, and truly happy with his life-com¬
panion in the last year of his life, which, despite his frightful
illness, perfected him. He was working with pleasure, read
“A Little Woman” aloud for me, wrote The Burrow, from
which he also read some passages aloud to me. When I in¬
troduced him to the manager of the publishing firm “Die
Schmiede,” he agreed, without much need of long arguments
to persuade him, to the publication of four short stories as a
title for which he took the name of one of them, “A Hunger-
Artist.” From all these circumstantial indications of his in¬
terest in life, I then later gathered the courage to regard as
no longer valid his written instructions to me—written long
before this period—which forbade the publication of any of
his posthumous papers.
It was not only to me that Franz seemed to have found
salvation in his whole existence, to have become a new man—
from his letters you can see his good spirits and the firmness
he had finally won. Take, for example, the following letter to
his sister:
198
Dear Valli
The table is standing by the fire. I have just moved from
the fireplace because it’s too warm there, even for my back
which is always cold. My oil-lamp burns wonderfully, a
masterpiece of lamp-making, and of shopping—it has been
put together out of bought and borrowed little bits—not of
course by me—how could I manage a thing like that! You
can light it without taking the lamp glass and the globe off;
really there is only one thing wrong with it, it won’t burn
without oil; but after all the rest of us don’t do that—and so I
sit down and take out your dear letter, now so old. The clock
is ticking, I have got used even to the ticking of the clock, I
don’t hear it very often, besides, and that generally when I
am doing something particularly praiseworthy. In fact the
clock has certain personal relations to me, like many things
in the room, save that now, particularly since I gave notice—
or, more accurately, since I was given notice, which is a good
thing from every angle, and, moreover, a complicated affair
it would take pages to describe—they seem to be beginning
to turn their backs on me, above all the calendar, about
whose mottoes I have already written to father and mother.
Lately it is as if it has been metamorphosed. Either it is abso¬
lutely uncommunicative—for example, you want its advice,
you go up to it, but the only thing it says is, “Feast of the
Reformation”—which probably has a deeper significance, but
who can discover it?—or on the contrary, it is nastily ironic.
Lately, for example, I was reading something and hit upon
an idea as I was doing so that seemed to me very good, or
rather full of significance, so much so that I wanted to ask the
calendar’s opinion on it—it’s only on such accidental occa¬
sions that it answers, in the course of its day, not like, say, by
tearing off a page of the calendar punctually at a fixed time—
“Even a blind dog finds something sometimes,” it said.
Another time I was horrified at the coal bill, whereupon it
told me, “Happiness and contentment are the joy of life,”
in which there is admittedly together with the irony an of¬
fensive insensitivity: it is impatient, it can’t wait any longer
for the day I leave; but perhaps it is only that it wishes to
199
make parting easy for me. Perhaps under the page giving
the date of the day I leave there will be a page which I shall
no longer see on which is written, “God has told each loving
heart, the day will come when we must part.” No, one should
not write down everything one thinks about one’s calendar,
“He is only a man, like yourself, after all.”
If I tried to write you about everything I come into contact
with in this way, I should of course never come to the end,
and it would give the appearance that I am leading a busy
social life, but in reality it is very quiet where I am, yet never
too quiet. Of the excitements of Berlin, bad and good, I know
very little; more of the former, of course. By the way, does
P. know what you say in Berlin when you are asked, “How
are you!” Oh, of course he’ll know it. You all know more
about Berlin than I do. Well at the risk of repeating an
old, old joke, from the point of view of fact it is after all
always topical, the answer is “Rotten X the index figure.”
And this one—a man is talking enthusiastically about the
physical culture festival at Leipzig: “What a tremendous
sight when the 750,000 athletes march in!” The other an¬
swers, counting up carefully, “Well, that’s nothing, after
all—three and a half peace-time athletes.”1
How are things—this is no longer a joke any more, but I
hope not something sad either—in the Jewish school? Have
you read the paper by the young teacher in “Self-defense”? 2
Very well-intentioned, and zealous. I have again heard that
A. is doing very well, and Miss M., they say, has reformed the
whole of gymnastics in Palestine. You must not be too an¬
noyed at old A.’s head for business. After all, it was already
a tremendous thing to take the whole family on his back and
cart them over the sea to Palestine. That so many of his kind
do it is no less a miracle of the waters than Moses in the Red
Sea.
I thank M. and L. ever so much for their letters. Remark-
1 A reference to the inflation of the mark which had accustomed
Berliners to divide all figures by a huge divisor, according to the index
figure posted each day.
2 Selbstwehr—the organ of the Zionist movement in Prague.
200
able how their handwritings, if you compare them, convey
not perhaps the differences in their characters, but almost
their corporal differences; at least so it seems to me in this
last couple of letters. M. asks what about her life interests
me most. Well, what she is reading; if she still dances. Here,
in the Jewish People’s Home, all the girls learn rhythmic
dancing, free of charge, of course—and if she still wears
glasses. I am to send Anny G.’s love to L. A dear, lovely,
clever child, L., that is to say, but so is Anny—she is learning
Hebrew hard, can almost read already, and sing a new song.
Is L. making progress, too?
But now it is high time to go to bed. Well, I have been
with you almost a whole evening, and it is so far from Stock-
haus lane, to Miquel st.—Love . . .

The frightful winter of the inflation period has begun. It is

that which really killed Franz, so I think. Every time Franz
goes from our quiet suburb to Berlin, he comes home “as
if he were coming back from the field of battle”—so Dora
tells me. The sufferings of the poor touch him to the heart; he
comes back “ash-gray.” “He fives with such intensity,” says
Dora, “that he has died a thousand deaths in his fife.” But it
is not sheer pity; he himself must also endure great priva¬
tions, because he stubbornly insists on managing on his tiny
pension. Only in the worst case and under great pressure
will he accept money and parcels of food from his family. For
by doing so he feels the independence he has won with such
difficulty is threatened. Hardly has he earned a few pence
through his contract with the “Schmiede” publishing house,
than he thinks about paying back his “family debts,” and ex¬
pensive birthday presents—from the family who is worrying
desperately about him he keeps the true state of his affairs
back as long as he can. There is a shortage of coal. Butter he
gets from Prague. When he heard that his sister was a mem¬
ber of a Prague Jewish women’s club which was sending
gift parcels to Berlin, he gave her the addresses of people
he knew who were without means. “Not to let anything slip—
for the money for sending things like this generally runs out
201
pretty quickly. I am sending the addresses straightway;
could send many more of course, the supply will not run dry.
Next to some of the addresses he put the note “Kosher.” Then
he happened to catch sight of one of these parcels, and criti¬
cized it, saying, “There it lay in front of us, deadly serious,
without the faintest smile in the shape of a slab of chocolate,
an apple, or something of that sort, as much as to say, ‘Now
live a few days longer on groats, rice, flour, sugar, and coffee,
then die as best you can, we can’t do any more for you.’ ”
Thus it was never possible to satisfy his fine feelings.
So long as his health lasted he used to attend the Institute
for Jewish Studies in Artillery street. He attended Professor
Torczyner’s and Professor Guttmann’s introductory lectures
on the Talmud. He read the easier Hebrew texts. It was only
for the sake of these courses that he came regularly from his
suburb into Berlin.
Between Christmas and the New Year he went through
several severe attacks of fever, but recovered again. In Feb¬
ruary he moved to Zehlendorf, and his landlady this time was
the widow of Carl Busse the author. He lived a retired life.
Very seldom visitors came from Berlin—Dr. Rudolf Kayser,
Ernst Blass.
The rise in the cost of living began to worry him. “If you
cut yourself down to lodgings—over-magnificent lodgings, I
admit, I shall give one room up next month—and food—ex¬
cellent, I admit, conjured up out of two methylated spirit
stoves and an improvised Dutch oven—which may perhaps
also be an unwarrantable extravagance in comparison with
the man my former landlady was always telling me about
who cooked everything without exception in his bed—if you
live in such simplicity you can just get along, also only with
the help of your father and mother and sisters, it is true, but
if anything out of the way happens, then you suddenly see
that everything is impossible. Once I called in a doctor, Mrs.
L. recommended me a relative of hers, a famous professor.
Luckily he didn’t come himself, but only sent an assistant, a
young man not yet thirty; he couldn’t find anything more
than a temperature, and ordered nothing for the time being
202
except to stay in bed and wait. For this visit he asked twenty
marks, that is, 160 Czech crowns. The worst thing is, how¬
ever, that this price is not only somehow justified according
to the scale of fees—nobody ever asks more than his proper
fee here—but that it also fully corresponds with the rest of
the prices; everything is so dear, you must earn gold marks
if you want to five here; I am already sometimes beginning to
think I must give up the struggle against Berlin prices, and
think of Schelesen, Vienna, and Lake Garda.”
When one went to see Franz, he mentioned his troubles
only in a jocular way. Thus he once worked out for me a plan
for taking, together with Dora, who was such an excellent
cook, some small restaurant where he would make himself
useful as a waiter.
In the end it was impossible to shut one’s eyes to the fact
that Franz’s bodily health—despite his spiritual equilibrium,
which continued—was getting worse. One of his sisters went
to see him; then I came back from Berlin and warned an
uncle of his, a doctor, who went to Berlin and confirmed my
worst fears. On March 14, 1924 I was in Berlin for the first
night of Janacek (Jenufa) at the State Opera of Berlin, and
on the 17th I brought Franz back to Prague. Dora and Dr.
Klopstock had brought him as far as the station. A few days
later Dora followed him.
Now that Franz was living with his father and mother
again, he felt it, in spite of all the tender care that surrounded
him, as the shipwreck of all his plans for being independent,
as a defeat. Now he wanted me to go and see him every day.
Other times he had never spoken so energetically, had al¬
ways been extremely considerate towards the piles of work
that overwhelmed me. This time he spoke as if he knew we
should not have one another much longer. “Come tomorrow
again at this time,” he said with a certain amount of stern¬
ness almost.
As he grew worse and worse, he had to be taken to a
sanatorium.
“All my terrors surpassed on the 10th of April,” stands the
entry in my diary, “by the news that Kafka has been sent
203
back from the Wiener Wald [Vienna Forest] sanatorium, to
the Vienna clinic—tuberculosis of the larynx discovered. The
most fearful day of disaster.”
The only car to be had for the journey from the sanatorium
to Vienna was an open one. It rained and blew. The whole
journey through Dora stood up in the car, trying to protect
Franz with her body against the bad weather.
Robert Klopstock, too, proved his great love and loyalty.
He broke off his studies in Berhn—which were later to lead
to important research results in the field of the treatment of
the lungs—and devoted himself exclusively from that mo¬
ment on until Kafka’s death to looking after his precious
patient. These two, Dora and Dr. Klopstock, now referred to
themselves playfully as Franz’s ‘little family”; it was an inti¬
mate living together in the face of death. Franz himself knew
he was desperately ill, but was, as I was able to sense when I
went to see him once, full of hope and courage. He seemed
to be unaware of the imminent danger.
In the Vienna clinic—under Professor Hajek—he was not
getting on well. All efforts to get more considerate treatment
for him—a separate room, for example—were in vain. For a
few days he even had to lie in a bed next to a dying man, and
he told me afterwards, with great admiration, of the patience
of the priest who waited on at the dying man’s side with
words of comfort, until the last moment, when all the doctors
“had run away long ago.” I wrote letters to influential people
in Vienna, Werfel intervened energetically on Franz’s be¬
half, but the Professor just as energetically explained that
he could not look upon Kafka as anyone else but the patient
in room number so-and-so.
Dora and Robert Klopstock finally succeeded in having
Franz transferred at the end of April to the friendly, light
sanatorium in Kierling, near Klostemeuburg. Here is an ex¬
tract from a letter of Werfel’s to me: “Professor Hajek main¬
tained the only chance for Kafka was to stay in the hospital,
because there all the medicines and treatments were ready
to hand. He put up a direct struggle against letting him go.”
In Kierling, in a lovely room filled with flowers and looking
204
 out on the green countryside, cared for in every way by his
two faithful friends, Kafka spent the last weeks of his life—
so far as the pains he suffered allowed it, patiently and
cheerfully.
Professor Neumann and the university lecturer, Dr. Oskar
Beck, came from the hospital to Kierling. I shall quote a few
lines from a letter the latter wrote to Dr. Felix Weltsch, on
May 3: “Yesterday I was called to Kierling by Miss Diamant.
Dr. Kafka was having very sharp pains in the larynx, par¬
ticularly when he coughed. When he tries to take some nour¬
ishment the pains increase to such an extent that swallowing
becomes almost impossible. I was able to confirm that there
is a decaying tubercular action which includes also a part of
the epiglottis. In such a case an operation cannot even be
thought of, and I have given the patient alcohol-injections
in the nervus laryngeus superior. Today Miss Diamant rang
me up again to tell me that the success of this treatment was
only temporary and the pains had come back again with all
their former intensity. I advised Miss Diamant to take Dr.
Kafka to Prague, since Professor Neumann, too, estimated
his expectation of life at about three months. Miss Diamant
rejected this advice, as she thinks that through this the pa¬
tient would come to realize the seriousness of his illness.
“It is your duty to give his relations a full account of the
seriousness of the situation. Psychologically I can quite un¬
derstand that Miss Diamant, who is looking after the pa¬
tient’s interests in a self-sacrificing and touching fashion,
feels she ought to call a number of specialists to Kierling for
a consultation. I had, therefore, to make it clear to her that
Dr. Kafka was in such a state, both with regard to his lungs
and with regard to his larynx, that no specialist could help
him any more, and the only thing one can do is to relieve pain
by administering morphine or pantopon.”
In the last few weeks he was ordered to speak as little as
possible. He used therefore to communicate with us by writ¬
ing messages on slips of paper, a few of which are in my pos¬
session. On one of them he writes, “The story is going to have
a new title, ‘Josephine the Songstress—or The Mice-Nation.’
205
Sub-titles like this are not very pretty, it is true, but in this
case it has perhaps a special meaning. It has a kind of bal¬
ance.” He thinks of his father a great deal, of hearty eating
and drinking. He tells Dora, “When I was a little boy, when
I couldn’t yet swim, I used to go sometimes with my father,
who also can’t swim, to the place reserved for non-swimmers.
Then we used to sit together naked at the buffet, each with a
sausage and a pint of beer. Father generally brought his own
sausages with him, because the sausages at the swimming-
pool were too dear. Just try and imagine the picture prop¬
erly—this enormous man, holding a little, nervous bag of
bones by the hand, how we used to undress, for example, in
the little dark cabin; how he would then drag me out, be¬
cause I was ashamed; how he tried then to teach me the
little bit of swimming he pretended he knew, and so on. But
the beer afterwards!” Although he was a teetotaler and a
vegetarian, he knew how to appreciate the pleasures of beer,
wine and meat, used to take a sniff at drinks sometimes, and
praise their wonderful aroma—one wasn’t quite sure whether
ironically or honestly; quite towards the end he certainly did
drink beer and wine again, once or twice, and was enchanted.
“Don’t you have the feeling that Leonhard has a glass of
Pschorr in front of him when he is dictating?” he writes on
one of his conversational slips (making a reference to some
Leonhard or other which is not clear to me). Pictures of vital
strength are in the majority: “My cousin, he was a magnifi¬
cent man. When this cousin Robert, he was then about forty
already, used to come towards the evening—he couldn’t
come earlier because he was a lawyer, had a lot to do, what
with his work and his pleasures—well, when he used to come,
about five o’clock in the afternoon, to the swimming-pool on
the Sophie Island, he threw off his clothes with a few flicks
of the hand, jumped into the water and threshed around in
it with the strength of a beautiful wild animal, gleaming
from the water, with his eyes sparkling, and then was off
again like a shot towards the weir—that was magnificent. And
half a year later he was dead, tortured to death by doctors.
A mysterious disease of the spleen which they were treating
206
principally with injections of milk, in the consciousness that
it was no use.” He writes a lot, too, about his condition, about
needs of the moment, pills, bandages. He asks for “a top hat
like this made of water.” In between words like “sons of the
kings,” “into the depths, in the deep harbors.” He is tired,
full of impatience. And then again: “Max has his birthday
on May 27.” “Often offer the nurse wine.” “Here it is nice to
give people a drop of wine, because everyone is a little bit
of a connoisseur, after all.” “That is a pleasure, to give some¬
one something that gives him pleasure certainly and honestly
at the moment you give it him.” “One must take care that
the lowest flowers over there, where they have been crushed
into the vases, don’t suffer. How can one do that? Perhaps
bowls are really the best.” On Sunday, May 11, I went to
Vienna to see Franz once again. My journey was preceded
by a curious scene. When I got to my editorial offices Satur¬
day afternoon, they shouted to me, “Telephone! Immedi¬
ately! There’s a woman just calling you up from Vienna!”
Without waiting to take my overcoat off I dashed into the
telephone booth. It was Dora, who greeted me with the
words, “You rang me up.” I: “No, I’ve just arrived this mo¬
ment.” Dora: “Prague rang up, the Prager Tagblatt was
speaking, that’s why I asked for you.” In spite of all my efforts
to clear it up, the affair is still unexplained, because while it
is true the Prager Tagblatt often rings up Vienna, it never
rings up Kierling. Further, none of Kafka’s sisters had rung
Kierling that day. In a remarkable fashion, the whole journey
after that lay under the shadow of death. Just as I was about
to leave the house I was told that a young man in the flat
below ours was lying on his death-bed. In the train a woman
dressed in black spoke to me, whom I didn’t recognize imme¬
diately. It was the widow of the minister, Tusar, and she told
me all about her husband’s death and her own unhappiness.
In Vienna I spoke to no one, but went straight from the sta¬
tion to the hotel, and from the hotel to the station. Early in
the morning I took the first train to Klosterneuburg, and
from there to Kierling. I stayed till the evening, traveled to
Vienna, and the next morning back to Prague. In the fore-
207
 noon Franz had been quite fresh; despite all the doctors’ tes¬
timony, his position didn’t seem hopeless to me. We spoke
about our next meeting; I was planning a journey to Italy
which was to take in Vienna again. The first thing Dora
told me, and Franz bore her out—he was not allowed to
speak a lot—was the remarkable story of his wooing. He
wanted to marry Dora, and had sent her pious father a letter
in which he had explained that, although he was not a prac¬
ticing Jew in her father’s sense, he was nevertheless a “re¬
pentant one, seeking ‘to return,’ ” and therefore might per¬
haps hope to be accepted into the family of such a pious man.
The father set off with the letter to consult the man he hon¬
ored most, whose authority counted more than anything else
for him, to the “Gerer Rebbe.” The rabbi read the letter, put
it on one side, and said nothing more than the single syllable,
“No.” Gave no further explanation. He never used to give
explanations. The miracle-working rabbi’s “No” was justi¬
fied by Franz’s death, which followed very soon afterwards,
and Franz, too, took his letter from Dora’s father, which had
arrived just before I did, and more or less formed the topic
of the day for the “little family,” as a bad omen. He smiled,
and yet he was affected by it; we made efforts to put other
thoughts into his head. But shortly afterwards Dora took me
to one side and whispered to me that that night an owl had
appeared at Franz’s window. The bird of death.
But Franz wanted to live; he followed the doctor’s instruc¬
tions with an exactitude I had never observed in him before,
and without protest. Had he got to know Dora sooner, his
will to live would have become stronger sooner, and in time.
That is my impression. The two suited one another quite
marvelously. The rich treasure of Polish Jewish religious tra¬
dition that Dora was mistress of was a constant source of
delight to Franz; at the same time the young girl, who knew
nothing about many of the great achievements of Western
culture, loved and honored the great teacher no less than his
dreamlike, curious fantasies, which she entered into easily
and like a game. They often joked together like children. I
remember, for example, how they used to dip their hands to¬
gether in the same wash-basin and call it our “family bath.”
Dora’s care for the invalid was touching; touching too was
208
the late awakening of all his vital energies. Dora told me how
Franz cried for joy when Professor Tschiassny—when he was
in the last stage already—told him things looked a little better
with his throat. He embraced her again and again, and said
he had never wished for life and health so much as now. Let
me contrast this with the journey we made together to Sche-
lesen in November 1919, from which I remember two things.
Kafka was talking about Hamsun’s Growth of the Soil, and
explained in detail how in this novel, partly even against the
author’s will, everything evil comes from the women in it—
further, as the train stopped somewhere, in tones of the deep¬
est despair, “How many stations there are on the journey to
death, how slowly it passes!” And now, in articulo mortis, he
would have known how to live and wanted to live.
Franz Kafka died on June 3, on a Tuesday. The body was
brought to Prague in a sealed coffin, and on June 11, at four
o’clock, was placed in the grave in a well-chosen site of the
Jewish cemetery of Prague—Straschnitz, on the outer side of
the cemetery, near one of the main gates. When we got back
to the house of mourning in Franz’s home in the Old Town
Square, we saw that the great clock on the Town Hall had
stopped at four o’clock, and its hands were still pointing to
that hour. Franz’s father and mother were later laid to rest in
the same grave.
I was able to get the following details of Franz’s last hours
mainly from Dr. Klopstock’s account.
Monday evening, Franz was feeling very well; he was
jolly, showed great pleasure in everything that Klopstock
had brought back from the city with him, ate strawberries
and cherries, smelled them for a very long time, enjoyed
their fragrance with the double intensity with which he en¬
joyed everything those last days. He wanted people to take
long drinks of water and beer in front of him, because it was
impossible for him to do so; he enjoyed the others’ pleasure.
In the last few days he talked a lot about drinks and fruit.
On Monday, too, he wrote the last letter which his parents
were to get from Kierling, which I quote below—a document
full of self-control and a child’s love for his parents, which
may be compared with the letters Heine wrote to his mother
from his final sickbed, in order to prevent any feeling of un-
209
easiness from troubling her. The letter runs:

Dearest Father and Mother

Well, these visits you write to me about sometimes. I think
it over every day, because for me it’s something very impor¬
tant. It would be so lovely, we haven’t been together for such
a long time, I don’t count being together in Prague, that was
just upsetting the household, but being together a few days
in peace in some beautiful district, only I can’t remember
when that was really, a few hours once in Franzensbad. And
then to drink a “good glass of beer” together, as you write,
from which I see that father doesn’t think much of this year’s
win§, in which, as far as the beer is concerned, I agree with
him. Apart from that, a thing I often look back on now during
the heat, there was a time once when we often used to be
beer-drinkers together, many years ago, when father used to
take me with him to the public baths.
That and much more speaks for your coming, but there’s
a lot that speaks against it. Now, first of all, father would
probably not be able to come because of the difficulty with
passports. That, of course, robs your visit of a lot of its sense;
but above all mother, whomever else she may be accompa¬
nied by, will be far too much thrown on me, dependent on
me, and I am still not very beautiful, not worth looking at.
The difficulties I met with in the beginning here in and
around Vienna, you know; they got me down a little; they
kept my temperature from subsiding quickly again, which
all helped towards my getting weaker later; the shock of the
larynx business weakened me at first more than it deserved
to in reality.
Now for the first time I am working myself out of all these
weaknesses with the help of Dora and Robert, and how great
that help is you cannot imagine so far away—where should I
be without them! There are still troubles, as for example a
cold on the stomach which I caught in the last few days, and
which has not yet quite gone. All that works together, so that
in spite of wonderful helpers, in spite of good air and food,
and a bath of fresh air almost every day, I am not yet quite
better, in fact, on the whole, am not even in such a fit state as
I was the last time I was in Prague. On top of that take into
210
account that I may only talk in whispers, and that not too
much, and you will be glad to put off your visit. Everything
is beginning to go well. Lately a professor found a real im¬
provement in my larynx, and if I can’t altogether believe this
extremely kind and unselfish man—he comes out once a week
in his own car and charges almost nothing for it, so his words
were after all a great comfort to me—everything is, as I said,
beginning to go well. But the best of beginnings are nothing
if I can’t show visitors—and especially such visitors as you
would be—great, undeniable progress, progress that can be
recognized even by the lay eye, it’s better to leave it. Well,
then, shan’t we leave it for the moment, dear father and
mother?
You mustn’t think you could do anything to improve or
enlarge on the treatment I am getting here. It is true that the
owner of the sanatorium is an old and sick man, who can’t be
bothered with the thing very much, and my dealings with
the very unwelcome assistant doctor are more on friendly
than on medicinal terms; but in addition to the occasional
visit of a specialist, Robert is there, above all, never stirring
from my side, and instead of thinking about his examinations,
thinks of me with all his might, and then there is a young
doctor in whom I have every confidence—I have to thank
Arch. Ehrmann for him and for the professor I mentioned
above—and who comes after all not in a car, but modestly
three times a week by train and “bus.”

On Monday (and apparently also on Tuesday morning,

which however I hardly believe) Franz was working on the
first proofs which had arrived shortly before of his last book,
“A Hunger-Artist.” He gave orders for changing the order
of the stories, showed some temper with the publisher, who
had not paid sufficient care to this or that instruction. Dora
once said very rightly, “Really he demanded a great deal of
respect towards himself. If one met him with due respect,
everything was all right, and he didn t care a thing about
formalities. But if one didn’t, he was very annoyed.” At mid¬
night he fell asleep. At four o’clock in the morning Klopstock
was called into the room by Dora, because Franz “is breath¬
ing badly.” Klopstock recognized the danger, and woke the
doctor, who gave him a camphor injection.
Then began the fight for morphine. Franz said to Klop-
stock: “You have always been promising it me for four years.
You are torturing me; you have always been torturing me. I
am not talking to you any more. I shall die like that.” He was
given two injections. After the second he said, “Don’t cheat
me, you are giving me an antidote.” Then the words I men¬
tioned before, “Kill me, or else you are a murderer.” They
gave him pantopon; he was very happy about that. “That’s
good, but more, more, it isn’t helping me.” Then he went
slowly to sleep. His last words were about his sister Elly.
Klopstock was holding his head. Kafka, who was always ter¬
ribly afraid he might infect someone, said—imagining it was
his sister he saw instead of his doctor friend—“Go away, Elly,
not so near, not so near,” and as Klopstock moved away a
little, he was satisfied, and said, “Yes, like that—it’s all right
like that.”
Before this last scene he made a brusque gesture of dis¬
missal to the nurse. “So brusque as he never was ordinarily,”
Klopstock told me. Then with all his strength he tore off his
icepack and threw it on the floor. “Don’t torture me any
more, why prolong the agony.” As Klopstock moved away
from the bed to clean some part of the syringe, Franz said,
“Don’t leave me.” His friend answered, “But I am not leaving
you.” Franz answered in a deep voice, “But I am leaving you.”
I want to quote from a letter that Klopstock wrote on June
4 from Kierling, without altering his characteristic, odd
grammar. “Poor Dora, oh we are all poor, who is so utterly
poor in the world as we—she is whispering without stopping;
one can only make out, ‘My love, my love, my good one’—I
promised her that we should go and see Franz again this
afternoon if she would lie down. So she lay down. See him,
‘who is so alone, so quite alone, we have nothing to do, and
sit here and leave him there 1 alone in the dark, uncovered—
O my God! My love’... and so it goes on. What is happening
here with us—I say always so ‘us,’ we called ourselves, you
see, ‘Franz’s little family,’ is indescribable, and should never
be described. Who knows Dora, only he can know what love
means. So few understand it, and that increases pain and
1 In the mortuary.
212
suffering. But you, wont you, you will understand it! . . .
We don’t yet know at all what has happened to us, but slowly,
slowly it will get clearer and clearer, and more painfully
dark at the same time. Particularly we don’t know it, who
have him still with us. Now we are going there again to
Franz. So stiff, so severe, so unapproachable is his face, as
his soul was pure and severe. Severe—a king’s face from the
oldest and noblest stock. The gentleness of his human ex¬
istence has gone, only his incomparable soul still forms his
stiff, dear face. So beautiful is it as an old marble bust.”

I must add finally that the voices of Hugh Walpole, Hux¬

ley, Bennett, Andre Gide, Hermann Hesse, Buber, Thomas
Mann, Heinrich Mann, Werfel, and many others in German,
French, Dutch, Czech, Polish, Italian, and Hebrew, in Eng¬
land and America, united in explaining Kafka’s importance,
and that his works have appeared in all these languages, and
awakened admiration.

Postscript—I closed the first (German) edition of this bi¬

ography in 1937 with the above words. Now, in 1947, one
can hardly survey the gigantic essay literature that is con¬
cerned with Kafka. This literature contains, alongside iso¬
lated comments which are correct, very many absurdities
and contradictions. But Kafka has struck root in some few
spirits. In them his pure light continues to burn. Kafka’s art
has also in other respects been formative of style in many
points, without its religious depth and power to convert
being clear to everyone who thinks that he is influenced by
Kafka or who writes about him. In fact one often has the
impression that here and there only the externals of Kafka’s
methods have been imitated or analyzed, but not his essen¬
tial endeavor, which is perhaps beyond the reach of some
who write so much about him and his art. If humanity
would only better understand what has been presented to it
in the person and work of Kafka it would undoubtedly be in
a quite different position; for which reason the attempt to
deal effectively with Kafka’s aims cannot be regarded as
completed by this book either.
213
 CHAPTER VIII

NEW ASPECTS OF KAFKA

FEW writers have been subject to the fate which was Kafka’s:
to remain almost utterly unknown during life, after death to
be rapidly lifted to world fame.
In the case of Franz Kafka, this fate cannot be considered
so cruel, since he was a man utterly indifferent to fame. Writ¬
ing was for him “a form of prayer” (as he put it in one of his
diaries). His efforts were directed toward inner perfection,
toward a stainless life. It was not that he did not care what
the world thought of him; rather, he simply had not time to
worry about it. For he was wholly occupied with the striving
for the highest ethical pinnacle a man can attain—a pinnacle
which in truth scarcely can be attained. He was filled with a
drive, intensified to the point of pain and semi-rnadness, not
to brook any vice in himself, any fie, any self-deception, nor
any offence against his fellow men—this passion for perfec¬
tion often took the form of self-humiliation, since Kafka saw
his own weaknesses as though under a microscope, magni¬
fied to many times their size. How he despaired of himself
on account of these weaknesses, longing as he did for inti¬
mate fusion with the Pure, the Divine, which in his aphorisms
he described as the “Indestructible.” This ideal preoccupied
him throughout his life. In this sense Kafka, of all modern
writers, is the one most closely akin to Tolstoi. “Man cannot
live without a lasting trust in something indestructible within
himself’—in this sentence Kafka formulated his religious
position.
After his death it was not easy to find an important pub¬
lisher who would undertake to bring out a posthumous
edition of Kafka’s work. I had to go to a different publishing
house for almost each successive volume. I tried to interest
a few prominent personages in these works. Gerhart Haupt¬
mann wrote to me that he had unfortunately never heard the
214
name Kafka. Today one can scarcely open any issue of a Ger¬
man, French, English, American or Italian literary review
without encountering that name.
Now that the personality of Kafka has more or less entered
the common domain, we are faced with the inevitable distor¬
tions of his image. These we can confidently pass over, and
rest our faith in that “Indestructible” of which Kafka him¬
self spoke. In other works, we are confident that, with the
passage of time, the proper outlines of that complex person¬
ality will emerge of their own accord.
Nevertheless, it is gratifying that even today the right and
essential features of Kafka are occasionally portrayed—the
more so when witnesses come forth who once had personal
ties with Kafka. Thus I recently received Erinnerungen an
Kafka (“Recollections of Kafka”), written by a friend of
Kafka’s (Friedrich Thieberger, now in Jerusalem). Thus also
Frau Dora Dymant,1 who was Kafka’s companion during the
last years of his life, recounted a great deal about the time
she spent with Kafka.2 Much of what she said in public and
private during her all too brief stay in Israel was written
down by Felix Weltsch. In addition we have what Marthe
Robert has written concerning Dora, and a remarkable book
by Gustav Janouch. The special value of this lies in Janouch’s
having written down Kafka’s conversation during his fife-
time.
In the preface to his book, and in the Notes and Explana¬
tions of the Appendix, Janouch has related a bit of his own
story, the genesis of the Gesprache mit Kafka (Conversations
with Kafka),3 and the varied fortunes of the manuscript.
Here I should like to tell how the manuscript came to me,
and point out what it contributes to our knowledge of Kafka’s
fife for the period beginning March 1920—the time at which
Janouch met Kafka.
In May 1947—eight years after I had left my birthplace of

1 Died in London, August 1952.

2 See J. P. Hodin, “Erinnerungen an Franz Kafka.” Der Monat,
I, 8-9. Berlin 1949.
3 New York 1953.
215
Prague for good—I received a letter from that city which
began: “I do not know whether you will still remember me.
I am that musician of whom you wrote in the Prager Tage-
blatt shortly before your departure, and the person who
arranged Florian’s publication of the Czech edition of Franz
Kafka’s Metamorphosis.” My correspondent went on to ask
whether he might send to me his “diary entries on Franz
Kafka,” for which he was seeking a publisher. “Franz Kafka
represents my youth—and much more. So you can imagine
my suspense,” Janouch wrote in a second letter to me.
The manuscript arrived after a considerable delay. Then,
due to the fact that I was then overburdened with work, it
lay around unread for a rather long time. At last my secretary,
Frau Ester Hoffe (to whom I am infinitely indebted for her
assistance in sifting through and editing Franz Kafka’s
papers), took it upon herself to look into the manuscript. She
read it, and informed me that it was a very valuable piece of
work. Now I too read it, and was stunned by the wealth of
new material I encountered—which plainly and unmistak¬
ably bore the stamp of Kafka’s peculiar genius. Kafka’s
appearance, too, his manner of speech, his expressive and yet
delicate way of gesticulating, the very movements of his
facial muscles, were reproduced in the most vivid manner. I
felt as if my friend had suddenly returned to life and had just
entered the room. Once more I heard him speaking, saw his
animated, shining eyes resting upon me, felt his quiet, pained
smile, and was deeply stirred by his wisdom.
Shortly afterwards came Dora Dymant’s visit to Israel. She
visited me often, and on one such visit I read to her from
Janouch’s manuscript. It affected her as it had me; she too
recognized Kafka’s inimitable style and his way of thought
in all the conversations that Janouch had preserved. She also
was shaken by the feeling of having again encountered Kafka.
Thus the genuineness of the material is supported by two
witnesses; unexpectedly a third soon appeared. Kafka’s
Letters to Milena were edited by my friend Willy Haas.1
i New York 1953.
216
These letters had lain for more than two decades in the safe-
deposit vault of a Prague bank; I had not known them at all.
Now I read these letters. To my mind they belong among the
most significant love-letters of all time and will ultimately
take their place beside the ardently humble letters of Julie
de l’Espinasse. There were several passages in them referring
to that shy young poet Gustav Janouch who worshipped
Kafka, brought him his first poems, engaged him in discus¬
sions—and was quite a bother, for Kafka’s mind was upon
entirely different ideas and passions at this time. The whole
circumstance of the conversations which Janouch describes,
and which he of course sees from only one side, contains a
goodly portion of irony when seen from the other side, and in
different perspective. But that very fact helps to confirm their
authenticity.
Janouch, incidentally, turns up in the 1937 edition of this
biography, although as a dim shadow, or rather: in the figure
of his father. In Chapter III I mention that Kafka made
friends of his colleagues in the office of the Workers’ Accident
Insurance, “even with some of them who were very simple
or very confused” (see p. 86). I mention, for instance, a man
who was the author of an “extraordinary memorandum.” I
have found this memorandum among my papers, and it now
lies on the desk before me as I write. The memorandum be¬
gins with the words, Nos exules filii Evae in hac lacrimarum
valle. The imaginative and eccentric author was none other
than Janouch’s father. At that time, I had actually made the
acquaintance of both the father and, somewhat later, the
son. The noble personality of Janouch’s father and the story
of his unfortunate mixed marriage emerge incidentally from
the pages of Gustav Janouch’s book, and next to the over¬
powering figure of Kafka form a poignant secondary motif.
(Cf. on this Kafka’s note about Janouch’s father in Letters to
Milena, p. 155.)
For Kafka himself, the whole period of his association
with Janouch was fatefully determined by Milena. Janouch
met Kafka at the end of March 1920. In Kafka’s diaries there
is a gap from January 1920 to October 15, 1921; the note-
217
books or pages covering this period are missing. On October
15, 1921 Kafka’s first note indicates that he had given all his
diaries to Milena. It is possible that he destroyed the very
parts that refer to this great love episode. After Kafka’s death
Milena brought the diaries to me, along with the manuscripts
of Kafka’s novels Amerika and The Castle, which she had in
her keeping, and which were intended for me. Milena’s letter
referring to this matter is the next to the last in the group of
letters reprinted below. Kafka’s notes on Milena, to whom he
referred in the diaries as M., were contained in the part of
the diary which I found elsewhere (in the little room in his
parent’s apartment which Franz occupied temporarily).
These notes run to May 1922. The passionate relationship,
which at first meant a summit of happiness to Kafka, soon
took a tragic turn. I have a letter of his in which he implores
me to prevent Milena from visiting him again.
Kafka’s private affairs, then, were not of the happiest at
the time of the conversations with Janouch. The young man
could not know this. Kafka spoke only in allusions of the great
sorrow that was preoccupying him at this time. For the most
part he talked in the detached and philosophical terms of a
sage surveying world events, the struggles of nations and
classes, as well as religion. That fact may convey some notion
of the tremendous self-control that Kafka fexercised in almost
every situation of his life—except when he sat down to write
in his diary, or when he spoke with his closest intimates.
Kafka’s talk, as Janouch has transmitted it, bears the un¬
mistakable signs of Kafka’s style in speech, which if possible
was even more concise, more pregnant, than the style in
which he wrote. Kafka was absolutely incapable of saying
anything insignificant. I have never heard a shallow phrase
fall from his lips—not even when he spoke of the most com¬
monplace things. For him—and for the person with whom he
happened to be speaking—the commonplace simply did not
exist. And yet he never hunted for witty and epigrammatic
turns of phrase; it all came effortlessly. If he had nothing vital
to say, he preferred to keep silent.
In the earlier version of this biography I passed over this
218
entire period with which Janouch deals. Since Milena was
still living at the time, I felt obligated to practice discretion.
In the meanwhile we have learned a good deal more about
this remarkable woman from Margarethe Buber-Neumann’s
book, Als Gefangene bei Stalin und Hitler (“A Prisoner under
Stalin and Hitler”). We have heard of the spiritual force and
encouragement Milena radiated toward everyone she met,
and of her death in a concentration camp. Kafka character¬
ized her dominant trait as “fearlessness” (Diary, January 18,
1922). For further insight into her nature we now have
Kafka’s letters to her, and the epilogue by Willy Haas, a
tribute to a truly great woman. And in a certain sense radia¬
tions of her personality are also present in Janouch’s account,
although her name is never mentioned there. For much of
what Kafka said to Janouch can be understood, can be heard
with the proper resonance, only when we consider that Kafka
was at that time beginning to think the Jewish problem
through with particular intensiveness, and that in Milena he
loved a Christian Czech—both of whose girl friends, inciden¬
tally, were married to Jews. Milena’s husband was Jewish
also. That fact led to violent conflicts with her father, an in¬
tensely nationalistic Czech prominent in politics. Kafka,
thrown into a milieu so entirely new to him, faced with a
challenge to his inmost being, and confronted with such vital
decisions, thought long and hard about the Jewish problem
and came to deeper insights into it.
After reading these Conversations with Janouch and the
Letters to Milena, it became clear to me that this theme is at
the bottom of The Castle, that prodigious ballad of the home¬
less stranger who vainly strives to establish roots in the home
of his choice.
Quite aside from all the wider meanings, the universal
religious allegory implicit in The Castle, this biographical
factor must not be overlooked. We find significant clues to
it in the Janouch material. Further confirmation comes from
Milena’s letter to me, from things she said in her talks with
me, and from my own notes on that period in Kafka’s life. In
The Castle we may find Kafka’s relationship to Milena mir-
219
rored with peculiar skepticism and bitterness. The actual
events which perhaps served to rescue him from the crisis
are rendered in an especially distorted form. Milena, repre¬
sented in the novel in the extremely caricatured figure of
Frieda, takes decisive steps to save Kafka (K.). She lives with
him, sets up house with him, and remains cheerful and reso¬
lute despite poverty and renunciation; she wants to be his
forever and by her devotion lead him back to the naivete and
immediacy of true life. But as soon as K. accepts and takes
the offered hand, the old ties which formerly bound the
woman assert themselves: (the “castle,” the populace, so¬
ciety, but above all the mysterious Klamm, whom we must
regard as an exaggerated and demonized image of Milena’s
legal husband, from whom she could not completely break
away emotionally). The dreamed-of happiness quickly
comes to an end, since K. will not put up with half a loaf. He
wants his Frieda for himself alone, no longer constantly
dominated by the emissaries of the Castle, the mysterious
assistant and Klamm. She, however, betrays him and turns
back to the realm of the Castle from which she came. It be¬
comes evident that K. is far more fervent than Frieda about
his determination to achieve integral salvation. She is content
with a mere token of salvation, or at any rate yields too
quickly to disillusionment. In our talks together Milena ex¬
plained that her husband’s interest in her revived when he
learned that Kafka was his rival and wanted to marry her.
The parallels between novel and experience could be
carried much further. If we do so carry them, the self-tor¬
menting, self-castigating trait in K. emerges strongly. In the
novel he represents himself as a swindler who alleges that he
has been called to assume a certain post. Milena’s girl-friends,
who advised against the connection with Kafka, enter the
novel in a mighty metamorphosis, becoming the mythic
figure of the “landlady,” who has the qualities of one of the
Fates. She represents, as it were, the chorus of a Greek
tragedy. The curious jealousy and contempt of Frieda for
Olga in the novel may be seen as a counterpart to the attitude
taken by Milena toward J. W., to whom Kafka was engaged
220
at the time. As we see by Milena’s letters, she insisted that
Kafka break completely with J. W. and her family. Kafka
obeyed her, albeit with a protest against the sharpness and
injustice of her command.
The pariah-like character of Olga’s family also had its cor¬
respondences in reality. There are a great many other such
realistic building blocks to be found in The Castle—which
makes us admire the novel all the more when we realize how
the structure as a whole towers so high above all these build¬
ing blocks. Out of the prosaic facts of his own situation the
writer’s imagination constructed a vast, twilight edifice,
gloriously transcendent. I do not believe that we should
overestimate the importance of biographical details for the
genesis of a work of art; on the other hand, if we refuse to give
them their due, we are prone to come to false conclusions.
The Castle, then incorporates the thoughts and feelings
both of the Conversations and the Letters to Milena. Kafka
was engaged on this novel during 1921 and 1922. The first
date I have for it is March 15, 1922, when Kafka read aloud
to me large sections from the beginning of his current work.
The motif of the book, however, had appeared long before in
his diaries (for example, June 11, 1914: “Temptation in the
Village”). Kafka’s experiences in Ziirau in 1917 shaped the
milieu of the novel. I have even been able to demonstrate the
connection between the substance of the novel and his early
reading of the fine Czech novel The Grandmother, by
Bozena Nemcova, in which there is the theme of an alien
castle ruling over a village.1 The letters to Milena also con¬
tain an allusion to this classical Czech writer. These facts,
however, are incidental. The image of the castle may have
preexisted in Kafka’s imagination. Nevertheless, it took the
meeting with Milena to fill Kafka’s soul with the turbulent
content which fired him into writing his final great work.
Kafka’s letters to Milena, her letters to me, and Janouch’s
recollections provide indispensable documentation for the
period of Kafka’s life in which The Castle was being com¬
posed-documentation which is all the more important be-
i “Some Remarks on The Castle” at the end of this volume.
221
cause Kafka’s diary stops completely during the writing of
the novel, and is relatively meager for the few years he had
yet to live.
Milena’s eight letters to me, which I publish here for the
first time, provide profound insights into the whole relation¬
ship between her and Kafka, seen from her point of view.
Thus they afford an essential supplement to the picture of this
love-affair which is painted in the betters to Milena.
The first letter is dated July 21,1920. It, like the second, was
written in German, of which Milena had an imperfect com¬
mand. Letters 3 to 6, which are of far greater significance, and
into which Milena poured the whole of her passionate per¬
sonality, are in the original written in her elegant Czech. As
her relationship to Franz faded, Milena’s manner toward me
became more reticent; thus in her last two letters she returned,
to German, in which she sounded more conventional than
when she was expressing herself in Czech.
Frau Milena Jesenska was an excellent writer—and not the
only one in her family, incidentally. The other Jesenska was
her aunt, if I am not mistaken, who because of her chauvin¬
istic Czech attitudes and philistine outlook was held in dis¬
taste in our circles. Milena, on the other hand, was a regular
contributor to the liberal Prague daily Tribuna, a newspaper
that had been founded by Jews who felt themselves to be
Czechs—radical assimilationists and opponents of Zionism,
that is. It had developed into a paper highly respected in
literary circles, to which many of the best Czech writers con¬
tributed. For a long time Milena’s articles were a regular Sun¬
day feature in this newspaper. They constituted a kind of
“letter from Vienna.” I can still see the eagerness with which
Kafka would hasten to a newsstand to see whether the latest
issue contained something by Milena Jesenska. She wrote
accounts of life in Vienna, social gossip, reviews, fashion re¬
ports, columns on events of the day, and general psychologi¬
cal observations. Kafka could not find sufficient words of
praise for the subtlety, liveliness and winning style of these
articles, which he was wont to compare with the letters and
travel pieces of Fontane, one of his favorite authors. He was
222
always reading aloud to me long sections of these newspaper
articles. I must confess that none of the descriptions he so
highly praised made any particular impression upon me, and
none of the articles has stuck in my memory. But the fault
may well be mine. Kafka’s literary appreciation was certainly
not merely the result of his love for the author; it was based
upon an objective evaluation of her literary qualities. His
judgment in literary matters was always trenchant and highly
original; he seldomed erred. Wherever he did, we can be
sure that he was attacking, in a self-castigating manner,
aspects of the author which he believed to be faults of his
own. One example of such a strikingly misguided judgment
is his comment on Grillparzer’s “The Poor Fiddler” in the
Letters to Milena, p. 96f., where he actually speaks of the
“dilettantish and affected” quality of that work. To my mind,
this comment is entirely unjustified—and moreover runs coun¬
ter to Kafka’s own enthusiastic opinion of “The Poor Fiddler”
in his diary and in conversation. Here he was led astray by
exaggerated self-identification with the author.
The correspondence between myself and Milena began
with a matter which at first glance seems somewhat strange.
I had heard of the case of an unfortunate man who had been
held for many years in the Weleslawin sanatorium for nerv¬
ous diseases; his family had reasons for wishing him to re¬
main there. I had been urged to do what I could to rescue this
person from imprisonment. As it happened, Kafka had told
me that Milena had once been in this institution, and had met
this Mr. X. I therefore wrote to Milena, asking her for infor¬
mation about X. I knew the lady, though only casually; I had
frequently met her in the company of Werfel, and also of the
poet Paul Kornfeld. She lived in Vienna, I knew, and was
married to Ernst Poliak, a friend of Werfel’s.
The marriage was known to be extremely unhappy. This
man Ernst Poliak, gifted, versatile, highly cultivated, active
as a philosopher (in the field of logic), widely known as “Pol¬
iak the Expert,” exerted an uncanny power over Milena, and
over other women as well. It is interesting to compare his
character with Klamm in several passages of The Castle.
223
 I knew that Milena had married Poliak against the opposi¬
tion of her entire family; perhaps, in fact, her own enforced
stay at Weleslawin had something to do with the family s
efforts to put an end to the relationship. At the same time that
Poliak was involved with Milena, he had an affair with a very
beautiful, intellectually inconsequential woman in Vienna,
who was incidentally allied to or married to another man.
After the marriage to Milena, Poliak ostentatiously did as he
pleased, showing no consideration for Milena s feelings—and
she seems to have suffered a great deal from his ruthlessness,
but at the same time to have loved her suffering. She had to
earn her own living and was even reduced to doing occasional
porter-service for travelers at a Vienna railroad station in
order not to go hungry. Her millionaire family in Prague
steadfastly refused to provide any support for their “prodigal
daughter.”
Such was her unhappy state when Franz met her. During
the first half of 1920 he had gone for his cure in Meran. When
he returned to Prague, I scarcely recognized the quiet Franz
I knew—so joyously and tempestuously did he speak of the
days he had spent with Milena in Vienna. He wrote her sev¬
eral letters a day, and received a great many letters in return,
but far too few to suit him. Telegrams flew back and forth.
How often Franz begged me to come to his office in the Acci¬
dent Insurance Institute to help him pass the long hours dur¬
ing which he waited for a telegram from Milena. I saw that
his health, already shattered by his grave disease, was de¬
teriorating alarmingly under this inward stress. As my friend’s
faithful second—in the days of my own great love, later on,
he was to perform the same service for me—I pleaded with
Milena that she remember his illness and treat him with ut¬
most consideration. Milena’s second letter refers to that. The
tone of the first letter, was still relatively calm and impersonal.
The major subject under discussion was the affair of Mr. X.
However, this too is intimately connected with Kafka and
throws a bright light upon my friend’s humanity, for it was he
who had begged me to champion the man’s cause. At any rate
the two of us still had the strength in those days to take upon
224
ourselves not only our own tribulations, but also the suffer¬
ings of a third person. Nevertheless, to this day I can hear
like an evil omen the echoes of our footsteps in the corridors
of the insurance company. Ordinarily, Franz only spent morn¬
ings in the office—that was ordeal enough for him. But now
he also spent the afternoons there, for at any moment a tele¬
gram or special delivery letter from Milena might arrive.
Milena’s first letter to me begins as follows:

My dear Doctor:
You ask me for some proofs that an injustice is being done
to Mr. X. in Weleslawin. Unfortunately I can give you very
little definite information that would be adequate for official
channels, although I should be extremely glad to do so. I was
in Weleslawin from June 1917 to March 1918, lived in the
same villa, and all that I could do for the poor man was to
lend him books a few times and get myself locked up a few
times; for he is not allowed to talk to anyone and if it is seen
that he is talking to anyone, even about nothing at all and in
the presence of an attendant, everyone is locked up and the
attendant is dismissed.

There follows a description of the desperate state of the in¬

carcerated man. One interesting sentence, perhaps contain¬
ing elements out of Milena’s own experience, reads:

Psychiatry is a frightful thing when it is misused; every¬

thing can be abnormal and every word is a new weapon for
the tormentor. I would be willing to swear that Mr. X. could
really five differently and in the world. But as for proofs—I
can’t prove anything.

My efforts for Mr. X. were unsuccessful. But that matter

belongs to a later period. The final part of the letter itself
concerned Franz, whom Milena usually called “Frank.”

I have one more great request to make of you, Doctor. You

know that I can never find out from Frank how he is; the dear
225
fellow always will have it that he is “fine” and that he is super-
healthy and super-calm, so to speak. I want to plead with
you, really plead, plead—if you see or if you feel that he is
suffering, that he is physically suffering on my account, please
write me about it at once; I won’t tell him that I have heard
it from you and I will be a little calmer myself if you promise
me. I don’t know how I will help him in that case, but I know
for certain that I will help him. Frank says everyone must
“love you, be proud of you, admire you.” I assure you that I do
all that and thank you in advance many times—for one thing
for knowing that I can rely upon you.

In my reply I did not conceal the fact that Kafka’s condition

had gravely worsened lately. On July 29 Milena wrote to me:

I was really greatly alarmed; I did not know that Franz’s

illness is so serious. He was really well here; I didn’t hear him
cough at all; he was brisk and cheerful and slept well. You
thank me, dear, dear Max; you thank me instead of reproach¬
ing me for not having come to him long since, for sitting here
and only writing letters. I beg you—I beg you, don’t think
badly of me, don’t think I make things easy for myself. I am
tormented to pieces here, all despairing (don’t tell Frank!)
and don’t know what to do or where to turn. But that you
write that Frank does have something from me, does get
something out of me, something good—really. Max, that is the
greatest happiness there can be. Frank will certainly go
somewhere1—I’ll do everything I can, and if there is no other
way I’ll come to Prague myself in the fall and we will send
him away, won’t we? And I hope too that he will be quiet
there and in good spirits. I—must I say it—I’ll do everything
to see that it’s so.
The story of my marriage and my love for my husband is
too complicated for me to tell now. Only, the way it is, I can¬
not leave now—perhaps I cannot at all. I—no, words are too
1 This sentence refers to my constant urging that Kafka give up his
job and go to a sanatorium. Not until the end of 1920 did he make up
his mind to take this necessary step.
226
silly. But I am always looking for a way out for myself, always
a solution, always what is good and right. Please, Max, do be¬
lieve that I won’t let Frank suffer; please believe me that that
is more important to me than anything else in the world.
You are with him now and you must tell me at once if there
is anything to tell; you will be strict and truthful with me,
won’t you? I feel a little easier today because I have you, be¬
cause I am no longer so much by myself.
Please, when you come back, write to me about the practi¬
cal details of the trip (what about the office, for example)
and all that, how and what is needed for it, and above all if
the doctor really offers a hope that he can get well. But what
am I writing—all that is unimportant. The main thing is that
he goes away; he will do it, certainly he will.
Many, many thanks. I am really deeply grateful. Your letter
was so good to me. Forgive me for calling you Max—Franz
does it and I am already accustomed.
Many regards,
Milena P.

The beginning of the third letter refers to one of my books,

which Milena praises highly. She then continues, writing in
Czech this time:

I would have to spend many days and nights replying to

your letter. You ask how it is that Frank is afraid of love and
not afraid of life. But it seems to me that the matter is other¬
wise. For him life is something entirely different from what
it is to everyone else. Above all, for him money, the stock
market, foreign exchange, a typewriter, are utterly mystical
things (and they are that in fact, only not for the rest of us).
To him they are the strangest enigmas, toward which he has
an attitude altogether different from ours. Is his work as an
official, say, anything like an ordinary job? For him the entire
office—including his own part in it—is something as mysteri¬
ous and remarkable as a locomotive is to a small child. He
does not understand the simplest thing in the world. Have
you ever gone to a post office with him? After he has filed
227
away at a telegram and then, shaking his head, picked out
the window he likes best, and after he has tramped from one
window to the next, without in the least understanding why
and wherefore until he finally stumbles on the right one, and
after he has paid and received his change—he counts up
what he has received, finds that he has been given a crown
too much, and returns the crown to the girl at the window.
Then he walks slowly away, counts his change again, and on
the last step down to the street he sees that the returned
crown did belong to him after all. Now you stand helplessly
beside him—he shifts his weight from one foot to the other
and ponders what he ought to do. To go back is hard; there
is a crowd at the windows upstairs, “Then let it be,” I say. He
looks at me in utter horror. How can you let it be? Not that he
cares about the crown. But it’s wrong. There is a crown too
little. How can a thing like that be ignored? He talked for a
long time about the matter; was very dissatisfied with me.
And variations of that incident would be repeated in every
shop, in every restaurant, in front of every beggar. Once he
gave a beggar two crowns and wanted to have one back. She
said she had no change. We stood there a good two minutes
thinking how to regulate the matter. Then it occurred to him
that he could let her have two crowns. But no sooner had he
taken a few steps than he became very annoyed.1 And this
same person would unhesitatingly, with enthusiasm, filled
with happiness, at once give me twenty thousand crowns. But
if I were to ask him for twenty thousand and one crowns, and
we had to change money somewhere and did not know where,
he would seriously consider what he should do about the extra
crown which I was not supposed to receive. His constraint
with regard to money is almost the same as his constraint
toward women. Likewise his fear of his job. I once tele¬
graphed, telephoned, wrote, implored him in God’s name to
come to me for a day. At the time it was very necessary for
me. I cursed him and railed against him. He did not sleep for
nights on end, tormented himself, wrote letters full of self-
abasement—but he did not come. Why? He had been unable
1 Cf. Kafka’s letter to Milena about this episode, p. 113f.
228
to ask for some days off. He had not been able to bring him¬
self to say to the director that he wanted to come to me—this
same director whom he admires from the bottom of his heart
(seriously!) because he can type so fast. And to invent some
pretext or other—another horrified letter. What did I mean?
Was he supposed to lie? Tell the director a lie? Impossible.
When you ask him why he loved his first fiancee, he answers:
“She was so good at business.”1 And his face begins to shine
with sheer respect.
Ah no, this whole world is and remains mysterious to him.
A mystical enigma. Something that he cannot afford and that,
with a pure, touching naivete, he esteems because it is “effi¬
cient.” When I told him about my husband, who is unfaithful
to me a hundred times a year, who holds me and many other
women in a kind of spell, his face fit up with the same rev¬
erence it had held that time he spoke of his director who types
so fast and is therefore such an excellent person, and as it did
the time he spoke of his fiancee as “good at business.” All such
things are alien to him. A person who types fast and a man
who has four mistresses are just as incomprehensible to him
as the crown piece at the post office and the beggar’s crown
piece, incomprehensible because these things are alive. But
Frank cannot live. Frank does not have the capacity for living.
Frank will never get well. Frank will die soon.

1 These words are in German in the original letter. There is a funda¬

mental misunderstanding on Milena’s part here. That is evident from a
letter of Kafka’s (Letters to Milena, p. 79) which he sent to her at the
same time as Grillparzer’s “The Poor Fiddler.” He was sending her the
book, he wrote, because Grillparzer “looked down on us in the park . . .
because he is so bureaucratic and because he was in love with a girl who
was good at business.” Kafka was of course referring to the “poor fid¬
dler’s” girl, a person of upright, competent nature, capable of coping
with all the vicissitudes of life. In his own peculiar, ironically admiring
and yet at bottom really admiring phraseology, Kafka summed her up
as “good at business.” Kafka’s first fiancee was that too: not “good at
business” in a banal or pejorative sense, but upright, clear, energetic,
dominating life by her own force. In other words, she possessed qualities
for which Kafka had the highest esteem and which he wrongly (though
not wholly wrongly) thought were lacking in himself. Thus Kafka, re¬
ferring to the novel, was saying that he considered persons like the fid¬
dler’s girl “good at business.” Milena, however, missed the reference
and took the word in a literal sense.
229
 For, obviously, we are capable of living because at some
time or other we took refuge in lies, in blindness, in enthusi¬
asm, in optimism, in some conviction or others, in pessimism
or something of that sort. But he has never escaped to any
such sheltering refuge, none at all. He is absolutely incapable
of living, just as he is incapable of getting drunk. He possesses
not the slightest refuge. For that reason he is exposed to all
those things against which we are protected. He is like a
naked man among a multitude who are dressed. Everything
that he says, that he is and in which he lives cannot even be
called truth. Rather, it is such a predetermined state of being
in and for itself, stripped of all trimmings that could help
him by distorting life—distorting it in the direction of beauty
or of misery, no matter. And his asceticism is altogether un¬
heroic—and by that very fact all the greater and more sub¬
lime. All “heroism” is he and cowardice. One who conceives
his asceticism as a means to an end is no true human being;
the true human being is one who is compelled to asceticism
by his terrible clarity of vision, purity and incapacity for com¬
promise.
There are very intelligent people who also do not wish to
make any compromises. But these put on rose-colored glasses
and see everything in a different light. For that reason they
do not need to make compromises. For that reason they can
type rapidly and have women. He stands beside them and
looks at them in astonishment, looks at everything, including
the typewriter and the women, in equal amazement. He will
never understand it.
His books are amazing. He himself is far more amazing_
I am very grateful to you for everything. The best regards.
When I come to Prague, I may call upon you, may I not?
Cordially.

The next letter, undated, is one wild cry of despair. Milena

had received Kafka’s letter from the Tatra Sanatorium, in
which he broke off their relationship. She quotes what he had
written to her: “Do not write and let us not see each other.”
The reason for this break is obvious. Milena was prepared
230
to come and be with Kafka for a while. But she was not pre¬
pared to leave her husband and live permanently with Kafka.
Kafka refused to be content with a surrogate marriage, for he
regarded marriage as a sacred coronation of life, a common
fate to be shared with wife and children. Perhaps at that time,
given Kafka’s deteriorating health, it would no longer have
been sensible to think of marriage. Only accomplishment of
the impossible, the irrational—only a miracle could save him.
Kafka sought this miracle, and later—in Dora Dymant—
some rays of it came his way. But Milena, with her earthy
character, could not give it to him, much as she tried, close as
she came to the thing which would have shattered all bar¬
riers. “Am I at fault or not?” she asked me in the distraught
letter in which she herself had scratched out or made so
many lines illegible. She wanted me to tell her whether she,
too, was only another of those women who could not save
Franz.
Here is the whole letter:

Dear Doctor,
Forgive me for not writing in German. Perhaps you know
enough Czech to be able to understand me. Forgive me for
burdening you. I simply don’t know what to do—my brain is
no longer capable of taking in any impressions, forming any
thoughts; I know nothing, feel nothing, understand nothing.
It seems to me that during these last months something ut¬
terly horrible has happened to me, but I do not know much
about it. I do not know much about the world in general; I
only feel that I would kill myself if I could somehow get into
my mind the thing that keeps slipping away from my mind.
I could tell you how and why and wherefore all this had
happened; I could tell you all about myself and about my life.
But what would be the use—and, moreover, I don’t know—I
just keep holding Frank’s letter from Tatra in my hand—a
deadly plea, and at the same time a command: “Do not write
and let us not see each other; I ask you only to quietly fulfill
this request of mine; only on those conditions is survival pos¬
sible for me; everything else continues the process of destruc-
231
tion.” I do not dare to write a word, a question, to him; and I
don’t even know what I want to ask you. I don’t know—I
don’t know what I want to know. Jesus Christ, I would like to
press my temples into my brain. Only tell me this one thing—
you must know, you were with him lately: Am I at fault or
am I not at fault? I beg you, for God’s sake, don’t write com¬
forting things to me, don’t write that nobody is at fault, don’t
write me any psychoanalysis. I know all that, believe me, I
know all that sort of thing that you could write to me. I trust
you, Max, in what is perhaps the most difficult hour of my life.
Please understand what I want. I know who and what Frank
is; I know what has happened, and I do not know what has
happened; I am on the verge of madness; I’ve tried to act,
live, think, feel rightly, guided by conscience; but somewhere
there is a fault. That’s what I want to hear about. Of course I
don’t know whether you can possibly understand me. I want
to know whether I am the kind of person who has made Frank
suffer the way he has suffered from every other woman, so
that his sickness has grown worse, so that he has had to flee
from me, too, in his fear, and so that I too must get out of his
life—whether I am at fault or whether it is a consequence of
his own nature. Is what I am saying clear? I must know that.
You are the only person who may know something. I beg you,
answer me, please answer the absolutely naked, simple truth
the brutal truth if it must be so—what you really think. [Three
lines scratched out.] I shall be very grateful to you if you an¬
swer me. That will be a certain point of departure for me.
Furthermore, would you please let me know how he is? For
months I have heard nothing from him. [Two lines scratched
out.] My address: M. K., Wein VIII, Postamt 65, Bennogasse.
Forgive me; I cannot recopy the letter; I cannot even reread
it. Thank you.
Milena

The next letter is couched in a somewhat quieter tone. It is

plain, however, that her inner stress is still very great. Here is
the text:

232
 Thank you for your kindness. In the meantime I have to
some degree come to my senses. I can think again. Not that
that makes me feel any better. You may be absolutely sure
that I will not write to Frank. How could I! If it is true that
people have a task to fulfill on this earth, I have fulfilled this
task at his side very badly. How could I be so immodest and
harm him when I have not been able to help him?
What his terror is, I know down to the last nerve. It existed
before he met me, too, all the while he did not know me. I
knew his terror before I knew him. I armored myself against
it by understanding it. In the four days that Frank was with
me, he lost it. We laughed at it. I know for certain that no
sanatorium will succeed in curing him. He will never become
well, Max, as long as he has this terror. And no psychic
strengthening can overcome this terror, because the terror
prevents the strengthening. This terror does not refer to me
alone, but to everything that lives shamelessly, also to the
flesh, for example. The flesh is too exposed; he cannot bear to
see it. That was the thing I was able to dispel, that time. When
he felt this terror, he looked into my eyes, and we waited a
while, just as though we could not catch our breath, or as
though our feet hurt, and after a while it passed. Not the
slightest exertion was necessary; everything was simple and
clear; for example, I dragged him over the hills on the out¬
skirts of Vienna, I running ahead, since he walked slowly—
he tramped along behind me, and when I close my eyes I can
still see his white shirt and tanned throat, and the effort he
was making. He tramped all day, up and down, walked in the
sun, and not once did he cough; he ate a fearful amount and
slept like a log; he was simply healthy, and during those days
his illness seemed to us something like a minor cold. If I had
gone to Prague with him that time, I would have remained
what I was to him. But I had sunk both feet so firmly, so in¬
finitely firmly into the ground here; I was not able to leave my
husband, and perhaps I was too feminine, too weak, to want
to subject myself to this life, which I knew would mean strict¬
est asceticism for life. But there is in me an insuppressible
longing, a raging desire for an altogether different kind of life
233
from the one I lead and probably will always lead, for a life
with a child, for a life that would be very close to the soil.
And probably that weakness won out in me over everything
else, over love, over the desire to take flight, over my admira¬
tion and again over my life. You know, whatever one tries to
say about that, only a lie comes out. This one is perhaps the
least of the lies. And then it was already too late. Then this
struggle in me came too plainly to the surface, and that fright¬
ened him off. For that is the very thing he fought against all
his life, from the other side. With me he would have been able
to find peace. But then it began to pursue him even with me.
Against my will. I knew very well that something had hap¬
pened which could no longer be thrust aside. I was too weak
to do the one and only thing that I knew would have helped
him. That is my fault. And you too know that it is my fault.
The thing that you all call Frank’s non-normality—just that is
his greatest trait. The women who were with him in the past
were ordinary women and did not know how to live except as
women. I rather think that all of us, each and every one of us,
is sick and that he is the only well person, the only one who
sees rightly and feels rightly, the only pure person. I know
that he does not resist life, but only this kind of life: that is
what he resists. I I had been capable of going with him, he
could have lived happily with me. But only now do I know
all that. At the time I was an ordinary woman, like all women
on the face of the earth, a little instinct-ridden female. Hence
his terror. It was perfectly right. Can this man feel anything
that is not perfectly right? He knows ten thousand times more
about the world than all other people in the world. That
terror of his was right. And you are mistaken; Frank will not
write to me of his own accord. There is nothing he could
write to me. In fact there is not a single word that he could
say to me in this terror of his. I know that he loves me. He is
too good and chaste to stop loving me. He would feel guilty if
he did. He always thinks himself the guilty and weak one.
And yet there is not another person in the whole world who
has his tremendous strength: that absolute, irrevocable, nec¬
essary drive toward perfection, purity, truth. That is how it is.
234
I know down to the last drop of my blood that that is how it is.
Only I cannot bring this knowledge fully into my conscious¬
ness. When that does come about, it will be frightful. I dash
through the streets, sit at the window whole nights through;
often my thoughts skip like little sparks when a knife is honed
and my heart hangs inside me as if it were stuck on a fish¬
hook, you know, a very thin little hook, and it pierces me so
and gives a very thin, terribly sharp pain.
As far as my health is concerned, I’ve reached the end, and
if anything is sustaining me, it’s happening against my will;
probably it is the same thing that has kept me going so far,
something extremely unconscious, an involuntary love of life.
Recently, somewhere at the other end of Vienna, I suddenly
came across an array of tracks—imagine streets stretching on
for miles, like a great oblong pit—and down below tracks,
red lights, locomotives, viaducts, freight cars—it was such a
horrible black organism; I sat nearby and it was as though
something were breathing. I thought I should go mad for
sheer grief, longing and terrible love of life. I am as lonely as
the mute are lonely, and if I speak to you of myself as I do, it
is because I am vomiting out the words; they rush forth en¬
tirely against my will, because I can no longer keep silent.
Forgive me.
I shall not write to Frank, not a line, and I do not know
what is going to come of it all. In the spring I am coming to
Prague and will call on you. And if you write to me how he is
from time to time—I cannot cure myself of the habit of going
to the post office daily—I should be very glad.
Thank you once more.
M.P.

One more request, a very ridiculous one. My translation of

the books The Trial, Metamorphosis, The Stoker, Contempla¬
tion1 will be published by Neumann—Edition Cerven—in
the same format as Charles Louis Philippe’s Bubu of Mont¬
parnasse—you surely know the book.
1 Identical with “Meditation” in The Penal Colony, New York 1948,
pp. 21-45.
235
 Now I am finished with it—in these last months it devoured
my heart and brain; it was ghastly, to be so abandoned and to
work on his books—but Neumann wants me to write “a few
words to introduce him to the Czech reading public. Jesus
Christ, am I to write about him for people? Furthermore I
simply do not have the ability to do so. Won’t you do it for
me? I don’t know whether you may not have political objec-
tions-Cerven is Communistic, but the series of books is non¬
partisan. Neumann is so cordially glad to be bringing out the
book and is looking forward with such pleasure to its publica¬
tion—but of course your name would then be on it—would
that bother you? If not, I do beg you to write three or four
pages—I’ll translate them and include them as a foreword. I
once read something of the sort of yours—an introduction to
Laforgue—a very, very fine piece. Would you do that for me?
I’d be so grateful. The book must come out in the best possible
way, don’t you agree. The translation is good. And your intro¬
duction would certainly be good. Please, if you have no po¬
litical scruples, do that for me. Of course it would have to be
something informative for the Czech reader. But don’t write
it just for the public, but for itself, as you did that Laforgue
preface. Where you love, you are sincere and very clairvoy¬
ant. And then the way you say things is very, very fine. It
would have to be very soon, Max; please do it for me. I would
like to appear before the eyes of the world with this book as
perfect as it is possible to make it—you know, I have the
feeling that I must defend something, justify something. So
please.
And say nothing to F. We will surprise him—all right?
Perhaps—perhaps it will give him a little pleasure.

A lengthy pause in the correspondence between Milena

and myself seems to have ensued, as the beginning of the next
letter indicates. I have no recollection of whether the book
translated by Milena was actually published, or of what be¬
came of my preface. I have no copy of the book or the
preface. The other preface mentioned by Milena referred to
a translation of Jules Laforgue’s Pierrot which I did together
236
with Franz Blei, and which exerted a considerable influence
upon Kafka and upon the early poems of Werfel.
Here is Milena’s sixth letter:

My dear Doctor,
Forgive me for answering you so belatedly. I got out of bed
for the first time only yesterday; my lungs have about reached
their limit; the doctor gives me only a few months more if I
do not go away at once. At the same time I am writing to my
father; if he sends me money, I shall go, though where to and
when I do not yet know. First, however, I shall certainly come
to Prague and shall take the liberty of calling on you to find
out something more definite about Frank. I shall write you
again when I arrive. But please, I insist upon this, do not tell
F. anything about my illness.
I have no idea when the book will appear—evidently in
winter. It will be published by K. St. Neumann, Borovy Pub¬
lishers, as a volume in the Cerven series, Stefangasse 37; per¬
haps you could ask him if you may publish the preface inde¬
pendently before it appears in the book. There is little paper
and money; everything takes a long time: I did not want to
cut anything from your preface. (It is so fine.)
I have the impression that you are somehow annoyed with
me. I don’t know why I had this impression—just from that
letter. Forgive me the “analyses” of Frank; it is shameful and
I am ashamed that I allowed myself to do that; but I some¬
times feel as though I must press my brain together with the
palms of my hands to prevent it from exploding.
Thank you for everything, and auf Wiedersehen.
Yours,
M.P.

The two last letters from Milena belong to the first few
months after Kafka’s death. Kafka’s only actual meetings
with Milena were the “four days” in Vienna and the brief, un¬
fortunate encounter in Ground which precipitated the aliena¬
tion between the two. In The Castle, too, harmony between
the two lovers is of brief duration. And after their first night
237
of love we read: “He was too happy to have Frieda in his
arms, too troubled also in his happiness, for it seemed to him
that in letting Frieda go he would lose all he had.” Immedi¬
ately afterwards, difficulties begin, interspersed only by rare
episodes of trustfulness. Concerning the second time K. and
Frieda are together, the fourth chapter pronounces (right at
the beginning) a fearful malediction. I have already said that
the version of the love affair as given in the novel is to be
regarded as a bitter caricature. Reality was more generous
and merciful than the novel’s picture of it; he felt compelled
to distrust and denigrate his own emotions. Reality gave to
Kafka those moments of happiness that shine forth from the
glorious pages of the first letters, gave him the letters (un¬
fortunately destroyed) of Milena and his own rapturous cries
of gratitude. The climax lay between the “four days” and the
second stay together. Probably Milena also visited Kafka
later on in Prague, but these were only sick visits; when Kafka
spoke to me about them, he said that they had been on the
whole painful and disturbing, although he continued to ap¬
preciate the salutary influence that Milena’s personality ex¬
erted upon him. A meeting in Marienbad, of which Haas
speaks in the epilogue to Milena’s letters, did not in fact take
place; the diary note of January 29, 1922 refers to an episode
of many years past, the meeting with F. in Marienbad in July
1916.
The reader will feel, I think, the force and passion of Mi¬
lena’s nature in the letters I have quoted in extenso. These
letters form a valuable complement to Kafka’s own letters to
her, all the more valuable since, as I have indicated, other
direct documents of that period are lacking.
Here now are the two last letters to me (originally in Ger¬
man ). The first was written on her father’s letterhead, which
would suggest that a reconciliation with her family had taken
place.

Dear Doctor,
I am returning the book to you, with thanks. Please forgive
me for not visiting you. I scarcely think that I could talk about
238
Franz now, and you surely will not wish to talk about him
with me either, now. I’ll let you know when I come to Prague
in September, if you permit. Please remember me with friend¬
ship and give my cordial regards to your wife whom I once
probably wronged, without wishing to do so. If you are able,
would you kindly arrange for my letters to Franz to be
burned; I confidently entrust them to you; though the matter
is not important. His manuscripts and diaries (which were
absolutely not meant for me, but date from the time before he
knew me, approximately fifteen big notebooks) are in my
possession and at your disposal if you should need them. That
was his wish; he asked me to show them to no one but you,
and only after he died. Perhaps you already know parts of
them.
With warmest greetings, I remain
Your friend,
Milena Poliak.

July 27,1924
Dear Doctor,
I cannot come to Prague to hand over the manuscripts to
you, much as I should like to do so. I have also not found
anyone to whom I can entrust them, and still less do I dare
send the notebooks by mail. I shall try to postpone my trip to
Prague until October, by which time you will presumably be
back and then I can give you everything personally. I shall
also ask you to obtain my letters from Kafka’s family; you
would be doing me a great kindness. I personally do not want
to ask them for anything; I never got on well with his relatives.
Many, many thanks—I look forward to seeing you in
Prague after October 1. If you do not intend to be in Prague
then either, please write me, to Vienna, when you will be re¬
turning from Italy.
Sincere regards,
Milena Poliak.

Thereafter I had many talks with Milena, and also received

Kafka’s manuscripts from her.
239
 It can be a catastrophic mistake to try to analyze Kafka by
the rules of simplistic psychology. The following facts, with
which I became acquainted only a few years ago, bear this
out.
In the spring of 1948 the musician Wolfgang Schocken1
who was then living in Jerusalem, wrote to me disclosing the
fact that Kafka had fathered a son. As evidence he showed
me the letter of a certain lady, M. M., who had been a close
friend of his. In 1948 the lady was no longer living, and the
child had been dead more than twenty years. The particular
tragedy of this episode lies in the fact that Kafka never had
the slightest inkling of the existence of the boy, who had
lived until he was barely seven and died before Kafka him¬
self. The child’s mother, a very proud woman, independent
both intellectually and materially, given to withdrawal out of
sensitivity, may have had inhibitions about confiding in
Kafka, for the brief relationship had been followed by a last¬
ing alienation. I knew Frau M. M. casually, but had no idea
there had been any friendship between her and Kafka. In
fact, on the basis of what Franz had told me, I had rather
thought the relationship a more or less hostile one. In Franz’s
diary there are hints that point in the same direction. In any
case, M. M. was a person of consequence, successful, strong-
willed, uncommonly intelligent, possessing a broad, wide-
ranging view of life.
The effect upon Kafka would almost certainly have been
enormous, had he learned that he was the father of a son. It
would have exercised a beneficent influence on his develop¬
ment. For there was nothing he more fervently desired than
children, no potentiality within himself of which he had
greater doubts than this, that he could become a father.
Everyone who has read his journals has been touched by
those passages in which Kafka expresses his longing to be a
father, to sit beside the cradle of a child of his own. Fulfill¬
ment of this desire would have seemed to him a confirmation
of his worth from the highest court of appeal. He would have
felt ennobled—just as he always regarded his lack of offspring
1 Not related to the publisher.
240
as a special disgrace, a sentence of guilt that had been pro¬
nounced upon him. Perhaps that child, had Kafka taken lov¬
ing charge of it, would have been strong and well; perhaps
the self-assurance it would have brought him might have
saved Kafka’s own life; perhaps my friend would be sitting
beside me today, instead of my writing away into a vacuum.
But since that is not what happened, it must at least be ad¬
mitted that in this matter life has composed a story that
amazingly resembles the wanton cruelties and complexities,
the ironic bitternesses, in the works of Kafka.
Frau M. M. went to Prague to visit Kafka’s grave. At that
time she met my informant in Prague again. A long time after¬
wards, on April 21,1940, she sent him a letter (she was at that
time in Florence and he in Israel), which contain these cru¬
cial lines: “You were the first who saw me in Prague in great
distress, oppressed by premonitory fears. And even then your
music-making in your friends’ disordered room, and those
short walks through the magical city, which I loved more
than you suspected, helped me to get over terrible anxieties. I
had gone to visit the grave of the man who meant so very
much to me, who died in 1924; his greatness is hailed to this
day. He was the father of my boy, who died suddenly in
Munich in 1921, just before he reached the age of seven. Far
from me and from him, from whom I had already had to part
during the war and then did not see again—except for a few
hours—because he was prey to a fatal illness in his homeland,
far from us. I have never spoken of all this. I believe this is the
first time I have told anyone the story. My family and my
friends did not know, only my later employer. For that reason
he was so kind and awfully decent to me. I lost a great deal,
everything when this good man died in 1936. But now I do
not sorrow so much over any of this, for they have escaped the
sufferings of these times.” For a number of years Frau M. M.
had always spoken in so special a manner of Kafka and
Kafka’s work that my informant is convinced that this pas¬
sage in the letter can only refer to Kafka. Soon afterwards
Italy entered the war, and the correspondence between M. M.
and my informant had to be broken off.
241
 The visit to Prague had taken place in the shadow of the
seizure of power by the Nazis in Germany. M. M., who lived
in Berlin, rightly spoke of premonitory fears. She fled to
Switzerland, to Israel, finally to Italy.1 The last word my in¬
formant had concerning her came from the British Red Cross,
dated May 16, 1945. The report read: “Mrs. M. M. was taken
away from S. Donato di Comino, Frosinone, by the Germans
in May 1944, together with other Jewish people living in the
district. We regret that at the present time there is nothing
more we can do.” Through further investigation it has been
ascertained that M. M. died at the hands of a German soldier,
who beat her to death with the butt of his rifle. I have fol¬
lowed up all the trails which my informant has so kindly sug¬
gested to me. They led to several persons in Florence, to the
San Giorgio and Jennings-Riccioli pensions. There was some
slight prospect of locating the belongings of M. M., which
included many letters of Kafka’s. Max Krell, the writei, who
lives in Florence, hunted down every clue for me. But nothing
came of these efforts. It is possible that Kafka’s letters are
now in the possession of a certain E. Pr. who had obtained an
emigration visa to Chile for M. M.
We have never discovered what name was given to the
boy who was Kafka’s son, what he was like or in what way he
died. Few persons have left behind so slender a trail as this
child of Kafka’s.

Kafka’s aphorisms I have set aside from the body of his

work and presented as a separate branch of his writings.2
Not only are these statements short and self-contained but, by
their content and mood, they reveal another side of their
author. In them Kafka lays stress on the “Indestructible” in
man, on faith and positive trust in God. His narratives, on the
other hand, give free rein to all his doubts and uncertainties.
1 Another informant, independent of Wolfgang Schocken, has now
corroborated the story; in Florence Frau M. M. told him a great deal
about Kafka and her child, also about the “Berlin woman.” I am track¬
ing down further clues.
2 Great Wall of China, New York 1946, pp. 263-307; Dearest Father,
New York 1954, pp. 34-48.
242
In the narratives Kafka shows how man is confused and
misses his way; in the aphorisms he exerts himself to define
what the way is, and there are intimations that man is not
doomed to confusion. Naturally, we cannot create an artificial
separation between these two visions which Kafka expressed
simultaneously. Among the aphorisms, too, there are many
that make one catch one’s breath for sheer sorrow and per¬
plexity. On the other hand, the novels are irradiated with
glimpses of hope, not merely pictures of hopelessness. Kafka
is always the whole Kafka. Still, we may with some vadidity
affirm that the “Kafka of the aphorisms” tends more to be a
helper and teacher, while the Kafka of the tales and novels
tends to be the victim of doubts and self-torment. How, we
may ask, did it happen that these two aspects of a single spirit
divided themselves, with greater or less distinctness and con¬
sistency, between these two genres? One answer might be
that in the narratives, letters and diaries Kafka let himself
go, yielded, surrendered without reserve to his angels and
demons. In the meditations, on the other hand, in the apho¬
risms and in certain letters, he attained self-control, and an
attitude of manly command. He was no longer the sport of
the forces of tragedy and absurdity, but took a stand against
them, in affirmation of an imagined or real universe around
him. In this mood he could write the crucial passages in
which the freedom of man’s will is pitted against the machi¬
nations of destiny, grace against damnation. He could issue
a call to humanity to put an end to the “Alexandrine Battles,”
to usher in an era of peace, and to place hope in those seem¬
ingly submerged powers which call out from the depths:
“‘Nevertheless, you mute, marching, pushed and shoved
souls, you men trustful to the point of savagery, nevertheless
we will not abandon you, not even in your greatest stu¬
pidities—especially not in them.” Through the chaos and
the nihilism, manifest in Kafka’s world, there sounds softly
but unmistakably the note of love for the human creature
who will “nevertheless” not be abandoned—so runs the
promise—by the divine powers; he will become a blessing.

243
 CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE

1883 Bom in Prague, July 3.

1893-1901 Attendance at the German State Gymnasium.

1901 Beginning of university studies at the German Univer¬

sity in Prague; in Munich for a time.

1902 Plans for studying at the Export Academy in Vienna.

Beginning of correspondence with Oskar Poliak.
Summer in Liboch (Schelesen).

1905-1906 Summer in Zuckmantel.

April 1, 1906: Unpaid probationer in the office of Dr.
Richard Lowy, Prague lawyer.

1906 June: doctorate at law.

Summer in Triesch with his uncle, the “country doc¬
tor” (Dr. Siegfried Lowy).
October 1, 1906 to October 1, 1907: Practice at the
criminal court in Prague; later at the civil court.
before 1907: “Description of a Struggle” and “Wedding Preparations
in the Country” written.
Other youthful works (lost).
1907 October: Takes position with the “Assicurazioni Gen¬
erali.”
1908 Begins work at the Workers’ Accident Insurance In¬
stitute.
1909 Two sections from “Description of a Struggle” pub¬
lished in Hyperion.
September: At Riva and Brescia with Max and Otto
Brod.
1910 Beginning of the Diaries. Yiddish theater troupe.
October: In Paris with Max and Otto Brod.
1911 Business trip in January and February (Friedland,
Reichenberg). In the summer: trip to Zurich, Lugano,
Milan and Paris with Max Brod. Then Kafka alone at
sanatorium (Fellenberg’s Naturheilanstalt) in Erlen-
bach, near Zurich. Travel diaries.
1912 Novel “The Man who Disappeared” (Amerika) be¬
gun. Summer at Weimar with Max Brod, then alone
at Jungbom in the Harz Mountains. Meets F. B. on Au¬
gust 13. On August 14 manuscript of Contemplation
(Meditation) sent off to Rowohlt publishing house. The
Verdict and Metamorphosis written.
1913 Contemplation (Meditation) published by Rowohlt
(January). In May publication of The Stoker.
Garden work in Troja near Prague. Trips alone to
Vienna, Venice, Riva.
244
1914 Berlin, end of May. Engagement. Preliminary study for
The Castle (Diary, June 11). Trip to Hellerau, Liibeck,
Marienlyst (part of this trip with Ernst Weiss). Out¬
break of the war. Additional responsibilities in regard
to brother-in-law’s factory. Breaking of engagement.
Work on The Trial. In the Penal Colony written.
1915 Meeting with F. B. again. Work on The Trial. Trip to
Hungary with sister, Elli. Fontane Prize.

1916 At Marienbad in July with F. A number of country

doctor stories written.

1917 Apartment on Alchymistengasse, then in the Palais

Schonbom. Further work on country doctor stories.
Second engagement in July. September 4: Diagnosis of
tuberculosis. Sharing apartment with sister Ottla in
Ziirau. September 12: leave from duties at office.
Kierkegaard studies. Aphorisms (octavo notebooks).
Second engagement broken in December, at Prague.

1918 Ziirau. Prague, Turnau. Schelesen. The Great Wall of

China and The Bucket-Rider written.

1919 A Country Doctor published by Kurt Wolff. Fraulein

Julie Wohryzek (Schelesen). Prague Letter to His
Father. In Schelesen with Max Brod. In the Penal
Colony published.

1920 Meran. Sick leave. Milena Jesenska (Vienna). Back at

office in Prague. Arrival in Prague, July 5., End of the
year in the Tatra Mountains (Matliary). Robert Klop-
stock.

1921 Tatra Mountains, Prague. Milena.

1922 Spindlermiihle. In February back in Prague.

March 15 read aloud from The Castle. In May last
meeting with Milena. From end of June in Plana on
the Luschnitz with his sister Ottla. Prague.

1923 July in Miiritz. Dora Dymant (Diamant). Berlin.

Schelesen. End of September with Dora in Berlin-
Steglitz. Zehlendorf. The Burrow, Josephine, possibly
Investigations of a Dog. The four stories of The Hunger
Artist sent to press (Die Schmiede Publishers).
1924 Berlin until March 17. Prague. Departed for the Wiener
Wald Sanatorium April 10. Prof. Hajek’s clinic in
Vienna. Then sanatorium in Kierling, near Vienna,
with Dora Dymant and Robert Klopstock. Death on
June 3. Burial in Prague.

1952 Death of Dora in London (August).

245
 INDEX

“The Aeroplanes at Brescia” (F. Berlin, 37, 136, 141, 145, 147f,
K.), 62,104 152,197, 200, 203, 242
Als Gefangene bei Stalin und Hit¬ Bernini, Giovanni Lorenzo, 56
ler (M. Buber-Neumann), 219 Bible, 44, 56, 109, 153, 155, 184,
Amerika (F.K.), 35, 52, 128, 135, 189,197
137,150,218, Blass, Ernst, 202
Amethyst (Franz Blei), 69 Blei, Franz, 62,237
Anti-Semitism, 42,188 Bluher, Hans, 169
Aphorisms (F.K.), 214,242 Bodenbach, 151
Arcadia, 128 Bohemia, 56, 62,104
“Architects’ Fairy Stories” (Oskar The Book of the Judge, 144
Poliak), 55 Brahms, Johannes, 33,116
Art Activities under Pope Urban Brescia, 102f
VII (Oskar Poliak), 55 Brod, Otto, 101, 105f
“Assicurazioni Generali,” 79, 117, The Broken Jug (H. v. Kleist), 36
“The Assistant Public Prosecutor” Buber, Martin, 108, 113, 198
(F.K.), 150 “The Bucket Rider” (F.K.), 157
“At Night” (“Passers-by”) (F. “TheBurrow” (F.K.), 198
K.), 62
“At the Window” (“Absent- Careers of Artists (Baglione), 55
minded Window-gazing”) (F. Carossa, Hans, 44
K.), 62 Casanova, 103
Augustine, 184 The Castle (F.K.), 22, 52, 84, 96,
Avenarius, Ferdinand, 54 164, 175, 182, 185ff, 218-221,
223,237,
Chaplin, Charlie, 87
Balzac, Honore de, 52 Childhood, boyhood, 9, 14, 20f,
“Bar-Kochba” (Prague), 112 25,33,38
Baudelaire, 44 “Children on the Post Road”
Baum, Oskar, 72, 106f, 109, 113, (“Children on a Country
128,141,164ff Road”) (F.K.), 132
Baumel, Max, 62,64 Chinese literature, 64
Beck, Oskar, 205 Christians, Christianity, 74,174
Beethoven, L. van, 113 Die christliche Welt, 10
“Before the Law” (F.K.), 150, “The Circus Equestrienne” (F.
176 K.), 108
Bergmann, Hugo, 9f, 14f, 56, 112 “Clothes” (F.K.), 62
246
“Contemplation” (F.K.), 8, 106, “Eleven Sons” (F.K.), 139f
125, 127, 130, 132, 137, 235 E. Pr., 242
“Contemplations” (F.K.), 62 “The Equilibrist” (F.K.), 14
Conversations with Goethe (Bie- “Erinnerungen an Franz Kafka”
dermann), 111 (J. P.Hodin),215
Conversations with Kafka (Gus¬ Erinnerungen an Kafka (Fried¬
tav Janoucli), 215-219, 221 rich Thieberger), 215
“The Country Doctor” (F.K.), 31 Esther, Empress of Persia (F.
The Country Doctor (F.K.), 97, Werfel), 153
169 “Excursions into the Dark Red”
Czechs, Czech culture, 3, 22, 85f, (Max Brod), 107
111,219,222, 236 Experience and Imagination (Dil¬
“A Czech Maidservant” (Max they ), 95
Brod), 71 l’Espinasse, Julie de, 217

Dallago (poet), 102 Family, 25, 33f, 54, 98

David C opperfield (Dickens), F. B., 126, 128, 130, 140-146,
138, 149-157,164-167,196
Dearest Father (F.K.), 242 F.B.’s parents, 143
Death, 64, 133,172,209 F.B.’s sister, 149,157
Death to the Dead (Max Brod), “Fear and Trembling” (Kierke¬
62 gaard), 181
Decameron, 56 Flaubert, Gustave, 44, 46, 51, 53,
“Description of a Battle” (“De¬ 64,74,97f, 131,142,151,181
scription of a Struggle” Fontane prize, 154
(F.K.), 61f Fontane, Theodor, 44, 111, 222
Diary, Diaries (F.K.), 4, 8f, 16, Francis of Assisi, 56
21, 23, 31, 37, 41, 49, 52, 84- Franklin, Benjamin, 29
91, 94-97, 105f, HOf, 113, 116, Franta, Bertha, 67
119-128, 137f, 143, 145f, 150f, Freud, Sigmund, 20, 36
154ff, 164f, 172,178f, 181,193, Friendship, 25,40,47
196, 214, 217ff, 221, 238-240, Fuchs, Rudolf, 108
243,
Dickens, Charles, 137f Die Gegenwart, 61
Dilthey, Wilhelm, 122 Gelner (Czech writer), 86
Dostoievski, Fedor, 153 “George of Podebrady” (F.K.),
Dreams, 16,38 14
Diirer League, 54, 61 George, Stefan, 64, 103
Dyrnan, Dora, 196f, 201, 203— Gerer Rebbe, 208
213,215, 231 Germans, German culture, 3, 22,
Dymant (Dora’s father), 208 42, 57, 91, 122
“The Germans in Russia in 1812”
Edition Cerven (Neumann), (Paul Holzhausen), 111
235f “The Giant Mole” (F.K.), 95, 150
Ehrmann, Arch., 211 Gnosis, Gnostics, 75
God, 10, 33, 75, 97f, 122, 133f, “A Hunger-Artist” (F.K.), 198,
155, 163, 171, 173-176, 180f, 211
183f, 188, 196, 242 Hyperion (Franz Blei), 62
Goethe, J. W. v., 44, 51,122ff, 174
“Goethe and Tolstoy” (Thomas Illness, 9, 76, 162-165, 168, 185,
Mann), 17 197,202-213
Gogol, Nikolai, 44 “The Indestructible,” 49, 172f,
Grace and Freedom (Felix 178,214f, 242
Weltsch), 106 “Indian Summer” (A. Stifter), 48
Graetz, Heinrich, 111 Ingres, J. A. D., 133
The Grandmother (Bozena Nem¬ Institute for Jewish Studies
cova), 221, (Hochschule, Berlin), 202
The Great Wall of China (F.K.), Insurance, Insurance Company,
22,67,242 74
Grillparzer, Franz, 51, 111, 142, “Investigations of a Dog” (F.K.),
151 154
Gross, Otto, 157 Italy, Italian, 70, 242,
“Growth of the Soil” (Hamsun),
209 Janouch, Gustav, 215—219
Guttmann, Julius, 202 Janouch (father of Gustav), 86,
217
Haas, Willy, 108, 126, 216, 219, Jesenskd, Milena, 185, 217-239
238 Jesenska, (father of Milena), 237
Hajek, Professor, 204 Jesus, 109,174
Hamsun, Knut, 44 Jewish National Committee, 113
Hardt, Ludwig, 108,136 Jewish People’s Home (Berlin),

HaSek, Jaroslav (Czech writer), 196,201

Jews, Judaism, 3, 11, 22, 25—32,
86
37, 42, 57, 74, 79, 86, 109, 111,
Harz Mountains, 124,163
113, 135, 145, 153, 166, 171,
Hasidism, 153
174, 184, 187f, 190, 192f, 201,
Hauptmann, Gerhard, 214
208,219,222, 242
“Heaven in Narrow Streets,” 60
J.F., 110
Hebbel, Friedrich, 51, 111
Job, Book of, 17 If, 175f, 180-184
Hebrew language, 113, 163, 168,
Joseph II, 3,
197,21 Of
“Josephine the Songstress—or the
Heine, Heinrich, 210
Mice Nation” (F.K.), 95, 192f,
Hellerau, 150 205
Herderblatter, 126 Jurisprudence, 41,78
Herzen, Alexander, 153 J.W., 220
Hesse, Hermann, 44
Histoire de la litterature Judeo- Kacha (Czech revolutionary), 86
Allemande (Pines), 111 Kafka, Bruno, 3, 42f
Hoffe, Ester, 216 Kafka, George, 9
Hoffmannsthal, Hugo von, 44 Kafka, Heinrich, 9
Kafka, Hermann and Julie (par¬ “LondonFog” (Herzen), 153
ents), 3-11, 14, 16, 22ff, 30f, Lowy, Isak, 110-116,196
53, 91-94, 143, 145, 147, 162, Lowy family, 7f
169f, 198f, 202, 206,209ff Lugano, 80,119,122,125
Kafka’s family, 4—7, 19f, 78, 143, Luther, Martin, 56
148,154, 203,206,239
Kafka’s sisters, 8f, 14, 142, 154, “The Man Who Disappeared”
158-165,198f, 202f, 207,212 (F.K.), 128,137,150
Kafka’s son, 240-242 Mann, Thomas, 17, 62
Karl Ferdinand German Univer¬ Marcel Proust: sa vie (Leon
sity, 78 Pierre-Quint), 31
Karlsbad, 115 MareS (Czech writer), 86
Kassner, Rudolf, 44 Marienbad, 151f, 238
Kathchen von Heilbronn (H. v. Marquise von O., 194
Kleist), 35 Marriage, 19f, 25, 47, 139ff, 143,
Kayser, Rudolf, 202 151, 153, 155ff, 162, 164, 167,
Kierling Sanatorium, 204f 185,198, 231
Kierkegaard, Soren, 113,144,164, “The Married Couple” (F.K.),
170f, 180,184,198 30
Kingdom of Love (Max Brod), “Meditation” (K.F.), see “Con¬
54, 63f, 123 templation”
Kisch, Paul, 15,40 “Meistersinger” (R. Wagner),
Kleist, Heinrich v., 21, 24, 32-38 163
“Klub Mladych,” 86 The Memoirs of Countess Thiir-
Klopstock, Robert, 76, 186, 203- heim, 111
213 Memoirs of General Marcellin de
Kornfeld, Paul, 223 Marbot, 111
Kraus, Karl, 74 “Memories of the Kalda Railroad”
Krell, Max, 242 (F.K.), 150
Kropotkin, Petr, 153 “Memories (Memoirs) of Franz
Kiigelgen, Wilhelm von, 68 Kafka” (Oskar Baum), 74, 165
Kunstwart, 54, 57 Meran, 185,224
“The Merchant” (F.K.), 8
Langer, Georg, 153 The Merry Widow, 115
The Law, 96,135,174 The Metamorphosis (F.K.), 18,
Lehmann, S., 196 37,97, 128,134,216,235
Lessing, G. E., 122 Meyrink, Gustav, 44, 62
“Letter to My Father” (F.K.), Michael Kohlhaas (H. v. Kleist),
15-18, 21, 23, 25, 30f, 39, 41, 31
139,185 Milan, 120,126
Letters to Milena (F.K.), 216— Milena, see Jesenska, Milena
223,229 Minna von Barnhelm (Lessing),
Liliencron, Detlev von, 43 122
“Little Treasury” (Hebei), 44, 48 M.M., 240-242
“A Little Woman” (F.K.), 197f Moses, 109,200
249
Mozart, W. A., 88f “The Ploughmen” (Hans
Munich, 40,148,157,159, 241 Thoma), 54
Music, 115f Poe, E. A., 133
Polish Jewish troupe of actors,
HOf
Natural healing, 48,109 Politzer, Heinz, 33
Neue Freie Presse, 15 Poliak, Ernst, 223, 229, 231
Neue Rundschau, 44, 131 Poliak, Oskar, 7, 15, 45, 54—59,
Neue Zuricher Zeitung, 55 69, 95,178
Neumann, Professor, 205 “The Poor Fiddler” (Grillparzer),
Neumann, Stanislav (Czech writ¬ 223, 229
er), 86, 235ff Porias, Esther, 7
“New Lamps” (F.K.), 84 Prager Tageblatt, 207, 216
New Testament, 109 Prague, 8, 32, 37, 42, 59, 62, lOOf,
Nietzsche, Friedrich von, 43 108, 114f, 118, 124f, 128, 136,
Nornepygge Castle (Max Brod), 141, 144-149, 153f, 156, 159,
117 161, 165f, 168, 179, 185, 197,
201, 203, 207, 209, 216, 217,
On the Beauty of Ugly Pictures 224, 226, 230, 233, 237, 239,
(Max Brod), 104 241f
“On the Cheap” (F.K.), 120f The “Prague Four,” 108
Orbaan, J. A. F., 55 “Preparations for a Wedding in
the Country” (F.K.), 60
Palestine, 170,196,200 “Promised Land” (Max Brod),
Paris, 106,108,120 157
Pascal, Blaise, 153 Protagoras (Plato), 53
“The Passenger” (“On the Proust, Marcel, 3 If, 54
Train”) (F.K.),62 Psychoanalysis, 15, 21, 32
“Passers-by” (“Runners-by”) “Purple Death” (Meyrink), 44
(F.K.),47, 62
Paula K., 73 “The Question for the Individual”
“In the Penal Colony” (F.K.), (M. Buber), 198
50,133,146,149f, 154,175
Penthesilea (H. v. Kleist), 35 “The Railroad in Russia” (F.K.),
“Perception and Concept” (Felix 149
Weltsch and Max Brod), 107, Religion, faith, 26, 28, 35, 49, 86,
127 98, 134, 153, 170ff, 185, 194,
Phaedrus (Plato), 173 218
“The Photographs Speak” (F.K.), “A Report to an Academy” (F.
14 K.), 135
Pick, Friedl, 162f Resurrection (Tolstoy), 166
Pick, Otto, 108,113,150 “Richard and Samuel” (F.K. and
Pierrot (Jules Laforgue), 236 Max Brod), 119,125f
Plato, 25, 53, 64, 121, 173, 176, The Risks of the Via Media (Felix
184 Weltsch), 106
250
Riva, lOlff, 119,141,144,163 Synagogue, 26f
Robert, Marthe, 215
Rome, 54f, 60 Talmud, 10,47,170f, 202
Rowohlt, Ernst, 124,127 Tatra Mountains, 185
“The Runners-by” (“Passers-by”) Tatra Sanatorium, 230,231
(F.K.), 47,62 “Temptation in the Village”
(F.K.), 221,
Temptation of St. Anthony (Flau¬
Sachs, Hans, 15 bert ), 53
Sayings of the Fathers, 97 Theosophy, 74
Schafer, Wilhelm, 44 Thomas Aquinas, 184
Schelesen, 50,203, 209 “Thoughts for Gentlemen Riders”
Schiller, F. v., 126 (“Reflections for Gentlemen-
“Die Schmiede,” 198, 201 Jockeys”) (F.K.), 62
Schocken, Wolfgang, 240,242 The Thousand Pleasures (Max
Schoeps, H. J., 170,174,181 Brod), 48
School, 13ff, 25,41 “Tin-Soldier” (Andersen), 194
Schopenhauer, Arthur, 43,125 Tolstoi, Leo, 214
Schreiber, Adolf, 157 Toman (Czech writer), 86
Schultze-Naumburg, Paul, 57 Tonio Kroger (Thomas Mann),
Selbstwehr, 200 44
A Sentimental Education (Flau¬ Torczyner- Harry (Tur Sinai),
bert), 53 202
Sex, 11,32,37,156 The Trial (F.K.), 22, 24, 47, 50f,
Social problems, 81,84f 67, 84, 137, 146, 149, 150, 154,
Socrates, 53,64 175, 177-180, 182, 184, 195,
Sophists, 53 235
Souvenirs intimes (Caroline Com- Tribuna, 222
manville), 98 Tristan and Isolde (Wagner), 115
Sramek (Czech writer), 86 Tschiassny, Professor, 209
Stefan Rott (Max Brod), 86, 101 Tusar (minister), 207
Stefani, Giuseppe, Tycho Brahe (Max Brod), 81,131
Steiner, Rudolf, 94
Stemheim, Karl, 15 Univereity, 40,45,54,81,78
Stifter, Adalbert, 44, Upanishad, 56
Stoessel, Otto, 128 Utitz, Emil, 15
“The Stoker” (F.K.), 37, 97, 128,
135,154f, 235 Vatican, 55
Strauss, Emil, 44 Vegetarianism, 29,74,109,206
Strindberg, August, 153 “The Verdict" (F.K.), 18, 23, 37,
St. Stephen’s grammar school, 14 61, 97, 106, 114, 126, 128, 129,
Stumpf, W., 170 134,139,141
Sulamith (Goldfaden), 111 Vienna, 54, 154, 203f, 207f, 224,
Susmann, Margarete, 181 233,235,237,239,
Swiss girl, 119,144 Vienna clinic, 204
“The Village Schoolmaster” Wiegler, Paul, 104
(F.K.), 150 Wiener Wald sanatorium, 204
Vietta, Egon, 170 Wilde, Oscar, 44
Witiko, 74
W., 118 Wolfenstein, Alfred, 108
Wallenstein (Schiller), 164 Wolff, Kurt, 124,135ff, 169
Walser, Robert, 64 Women, 32,119,185
War, 48,149,168 “Workers’ Accident Insurance In¬
Wassermann, Jakob, 69 stitute,” 80ff, 84, 90, 217, 224
“The Watchman of the Tomb” Workers’ collective, 84f
(“The Warden of the Tomb”)
(F.K.), 74
Yiddish theater, 112f
Wedekind, Frank, 44,62
see also Polish Jewish group of
Weimar, 122ff
authors
Weiss, Ernst, 108,147
Weleslawin sanatorium, 223, 225
Weltsch, Felix, 34, 100, 106, 127, Zeit, 60
130,153,164,166,205,215 Zionism, 42,112f, 144,174
Werfel, Franz, 100, 108, 113, 153, Zola, Emile, 51
157, 204, 223, 237 Ziirau, 110, 156, 163, 165, 167ff,
Werther (Goethe), 46 178
“TheWhipper” (F.K.),50 Zurich, 115,163

252
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 Franz Kafka

“Readers will find it a muster of biographical facts possessed by

no one else but Brod, arranged with discerning intelligence and
affectionate understanding.” —Time

“His biography is the primary source of our knowledge of

Kafka’s personal life and character, and is invaluable to any one
at all interested in the mind of the genius.”
—ALFRED KAZIN, N.Y. Herald. Tribune

Max Brod, himself a novelist of note, was a boyhood friend of

Kafka and remained closely associated with him until Kafka’s
death in 1924. He was certainly the man who came closest to
Kafka in his lifetime, and it is to Brod, as Kafka’s literary
executor and editor, that we are indebted for rescuing and
bringing to us the work of this extraordinary genius. Out of a
lifelong loyal and devoted friendship Brod has drawn this ac¬
count of Kafka’s youth, family and friends, the inner struggles
of the young writer, his sickness, and his last days.
In many ways Kafka himself was as anonymous and enig¬
matic as the heroes of his novels. Perhaps no biography can
entirely dispel the enigma of Kafka; but a story of his life can
shed light on this complicated man who so ardently wished to
live a simple life. Brod’s biography has done this.

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