It’s 1907-1908. As I mentioned in an earlier post, after finishing his doctorate, the 23-year-old Franz Kafka, fresh out of law school, found himself tied to a soul-crushing desk job at the Assicurazioni Generali. The monotony of actuarial tables and bureaucratic tedium leaves him yearning for escape. But this doesn’t mean you should picture Kafka as a gloomy loner toiling away by the dim light of a flickering candle, morphing into a giant insect or getting summoned to sinister judicial hearings. Far from it!
In reality, Franz was quite the party animal. A glimpse into his personal life during his early twenties paints a picture of a more sociable and relatable Kafka, who, for example, had started studying Italian in anticipation of a potential transfer to Trieste (which never materialised). But more importantly, he embraced Prague’s vibrant nightlife with enthusiasm and gusto, as he later recounted in a letter:
I recall those long-gone, so-called gadabout days, when I spent many nights sitting in taverns without drinking. Judging by the names, they were wonderful places: Trocadero, Eldorado, and others of that sort.1
Kafka, in those years, spent his evenings sipping Moët & Chandon, exchanging flirtatious banter with waitresses—who also, it appears, provided, shall we say, more intimate “services”—and partying until the early hours with a motley crew of artists—“army officers, Berliners, Frenchmen, painters, cabaret singers,”2 and, of course, his partner-in-crime, Max Brod. As Kafka wrote to him in 1908:
Instead of our planned nightlife from Monday to Tuesday we could arrange a nice morning life, meeting at five o'clock or half past five at the Mary statue—then we won't have to let the women down—and go to the Trocadero or to Kuchelbad or to the Eldorado.3
Imagine a young Kafka dashing out of the “big portal” at 6:15, lamenting the “wasted quarter-hour” at the office. He strolls down Wenzelsplatz, a lively thoroughfare teeming with cafes and theatres (the Prague equivalent of Oxford Street or the Champs-Elysées). Maybe he meets Brod at the Mary statue—their designated rendezvous point—before heading off to one of those “wonderful places.” But these weren’t your average pubs, no siree.
The Trocadero was “the largest and most elegant wine bar in Prague,” boasting “artistic bands” and a convivial atmosphere. Imagine Kafka, a glass of champagne in hand, listening to a Hungarian violinist sawing away at a heart-wrenching melody while a troupe of dancers twirled across the stage.
Meanwhile, the Eldorado, located in a grand palace on Obstgasse, boasted a more sophisticated setting, featuring entertainment in French and English, a pianist softly playing in the background, and an unmistakable sense of romance. “The atmosphere was welcoming, especially for regular customers like Kafka; physical contact was permitted, and the boundaries to prostitution were fluid.” 4
Yet, all this revelry, on top of the long days at the office, eventually took its toll on Kafka. In a letter to his then-love interest, Hedwig Weiler, Kafka bemoaned his lifestyle, describing it as “completely chaotic” and lamenting that,
I devour the hours outside the office like a wild beast. Since I was not previously accustomed to limiting my private life to six hours, and since I am also studying Italian and want to spend the evenings of these lovely days out of doors, I emerge from the crowdedness of my leisure hours scarcely rested.5
Hedwig Weiler’s situation is intriguing. She was a “summer fling” he encountered while holidaying in Třešť (she lived in Vienna); his letters to her from that time demonstrate his romantic, poetic disposition, although they also allude to the difficulties of managing a relationship from afar. Ostensibly, he craves her presence not just on paper but in reality:
And what I really want is you, and even your letter is only an ornamental wallpaper, white and pleasant, behind which you are sitting in the grass somewhere or taking a walk, and one has to push through it to capture and hold you.6
However, Kafka’s intense feelings towards Hedwig might not have been quite as deep-rooted as his letters to her might suggest. As I said, he was, at the same time, out and about with Brod, merrymaking in Prague, hobnobbing with “waitresses,” drinking champagne (to Hedwig’s health, surely), and then, in a moment of madness, revealing how he, in his loneliness, had sought solace in the arms of a prostitute…
I am so urgently driven to find someone who will merely touch me in a friendly manner that yesterday I went to the hotel with a prostitute. She is too old to still be melancholy, but feels sorry, though it doesn't surprise her, that people are not as kind to prostitutes as they are to a mistress. I didn't comfort her since she didn't comfort me either.7
The dawg! Talk about mixed signals… Was Kafka simultaneously trying to convince Hedwig of his devotion while indulging in the pleasures of the demimonde? Or was this inconsistent behaviour, in essence, a manifestation of his true desires, his yearning for something more, something different—a desperate attempt to escape the suffocating confines of both his family and his corporate existence? Sure enough, there is an aspect of Kafka’s behaviour that is genuinely human and, quite frankly, relatable in his clumsy attempts to find some form of solace, even if it was an illusion, and his desperate quest for simple human contact. He was, after all, a lonely bachelor who led a double life, torn by conflicting desires.
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Shall we add another layer of complication? Sure! Kafka still lived with his parents and teenage sisters. His bedroom was sandwiched between the living room and his parent’s bedroom, with doors that probably didn’t entirely silence the sound of snoring or other nocturnal activities—practically a recipe for claustrophobia; no wonder he preferred to spend the night at the Trocadero! What’s more, in several letters to Hedwig, he mentions the need “to write to you in gray strokes again because those who have already locked themselves into sleep [i.e. my parents] have the ink.”8 And Kafka’s desire to write extended far beyond mere love letters to his sweetheart. His ambition was to shape his thoughts into words, to give life to his ideas. But these dreams were often thwarted by the mundane obligations of family life, by the demands of his employers, his noisy sisters, and the tyranny of bedtime.
Ultimately, Kafka’s existence oscillated endlessly between different yearnings, an ongoing battle to align his inner self with society’s expectations. Yet, as a keen observer of human behaviour, he was acutely aware of this inner discord. He understood the absurdity of yearning for liberty while being attached to the familiar or wanting love yet seeking solace in fleeting and monetised intercourse. As he confessed to Brod,
Other people make decisions once in a considerable while, and in between take pleasure in their decisions. But I make decisions from moment to moment, like a boxer, without doing any boxing.9
In the end, as often happens with youthful romances, his relationship with Hedwig fizzled out... But Kafka had little time for heartache—one might ask where he found the time to write at all!—as leisure time was not merely about partying from dusk till dawn. Stach highlights this point here:
If one reads “Franz Kafka” as the name of a celebrated, internationally acclaimed classic writer of modernity, it seems odd how indiscriminately he immersed himself in the cultural achievements and offerings of his era. He studied the works of Flaubert and Thomas Mann because he regarded them as formative for literature and wanted to assess them. However, he also read run-of-the-mill biographies if their subject matter aroused any sort of personal interest in him, and even as an adult he enjoyed stories about American Indians.10
Despite his extensive knowledge of art history, Kafka seldom visited museums and never went to opera houses or symphonic concerts—he wasn’t particularly fond of classical music. As Stach observes, “he did not exhibit a systematic interest in the top-ranking cultural achievements of his era, and he was utterly indifferent to things ‘one’ had to have seen, heard, or read.”11 Instead, Kafka often approached cultural events with the eye of a dilettante, delighting in spectacle and exoticism. Similar to his sexual life, in the realm of cultural entertainment, he was looking for all sorts of escapism.
This quality of “indiscriminate immersion” characterised Kafka’s fascination with a broad spectrum of cultural pursuits, often venturing into the realms of lowbrow entertainment. He wasn’t an artistic snob, confined solely to canonical works. He enjoyed spectacles that straddled the boundary between art and showmanship. For example, during the 1908 Prague Jubilee Exhibition, accompanied by his friend Max Brod and various “girlfriends,” Kafka was captivated by the emerging allure of cinema, vaudeville performances, tea ceremonies presented by imported Japanese geishas, “Abyssinian villages” complete with ‘Ausstellungsneger’ (literally, “exhibition negros”, a term used during the period; this might have inspired the conclusion of Amerika where the protagonist’s name shifts from “Karl” to “Negro”—but we’ll return to this point later). As Stach explains,
Since very few people at that time had seen remote continents for themselves, exoticism was an essential component of the early entertainment industry; but beyond the element of surprise and of foreignness, Kafka was eager to immerse himself in images of nonwhite people and foreign cultures, and he could spend hours listening to people talk about Palestine, Japan, or America, as though taking solace in the fact that a completely different life on this planet was not just the stuff of dreams, but a reality.12
Kafka also had a keen interest in cinema, drawn to the burgeoning art form long before the introduction of full-length narrative features. He would spend hours examining posters, re-enacting scenes at home, and persuading his parents and sisters to accompany him to the movies. In a 1908 letter to Elsa Taussig (Brod’s girlfriend), he reminds her of a planned outing and promises: “you will be stirred today by The Gallant Guardsman, let alone The Thirsty Policeman,” 13 whoever remembers these films…
Kafka was particularly fascinated by the way film collapsed time and space, bringing distant realities tantalisingly close. Writers of the period were equally captivated by the cinema as a form of escape: for instance, Ferdinand Bardamu, the protagonist of Céline’s Journey to the End of the Night, spends his days at the movies, seeking to get away from the harsh reality of life in New York.
Kafka’s receptiveness to various cultural influences is further evidenced by his enthusiasm for cabaret. Unlike the hushed atmosphere of a concert hall, cabarets presented a lively medley of music, comedy, and frequently risqué performances. Stach describes the typical cabaret act:
There were chansonettes with highly trained voices alongside buffoons, stand-up comedians, and brash emcees; there were satirical and “spicy” scenes; women performing “Indian” dances and exotic-looking singers; striptease acts that were advertised as “veil dances”; one-act vaudeville-style operettas; Japanese performers—and on occasion one could also marvel at Viennese celebrities.14
This omnivorous appetite for art and culture, high and low, near and far, suffuses Kafka’s letters of that period. A 1909 diary entry finds Kafka waxing rhapsodic about the Russian ballerina Evgenia Eduardova, whose “very wild” Csárdás dance left him enraptured for months. And in 1913, he wrote to Felice Bauer about his admiration for the Russian ballet star Vaslav Nijinsky. Worth noting, Kafka also shared this love of drama and dance with Proust at around the same time: think of these passages in À l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs where Marcel recounts his fascination for La Berma, possibly inspired by Sarah Bernhardt’s performance of Racine’s Phèdre.
Kafka’s letters from this period reveal a vivid picture of a young man who embraced the diverse cultural experiences available in his historical moment. As such,
If one looks at “Franz Kafka” from the perspective of his contemporaries, who lacked the benefit of hindsight, a very different picture emerges. The social identity he represented was that of an academically trained insurance specialist with a knowledge of literature and a petit bourgeois background, and by this measure, his taste in culture was nothing out of the ordinary.15
It’s like Kafka was just another guy. A guy who loved to dance, to laugh, to feel. He was just as human as the rest of us. A man of his time. A man of his place. A man of his lot. A man. Just a man. So, here’s to the young man Kafka. May his chutzpah and insatiable appetite for life spur us on to consume our days “like wild beasts.” Prost!
A few days ago was also the 100th anniversary of his death, so double-prost!!
Next time, we’ll discuss “Wedding Preparations in the Country” (Hochzeitsvorbereitungen auf dem Lande), p. 74 of this PDF for whoever wishes to read along.
But for now, here’s an intriguing piece by
on scholars’ fascination with Kafka’s wastepaper basket. Mind you, this academic “Diogenes syndrome” isn’t unique to Kafka. It also afflicts Proust experts: case in point, the latest Pléiade edition, where drafts, variations, and marginalia surpass the length of the actual Recherche! The rare exception might be the recent discovery of Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s lost interwar manuscripts, which sounds like a truly significant find. I’ll possibly revisit this topic at some point in the future.Reiner Stach, Kafka: The Early Years, ch. 21, loc. 6065.
Friends, to Hedwig W., 1907, loc. 830.
Ibid., to Max B., 1908, loc. 899.
Stach, op. cit., loc. 6075.
Friends, to Hedwig W., 1907, loc. 769.
Friends, to Hedwig W., 1907, loc. 655.
Friends, to Max B., 1908, loc. 958.
Friends, to Hedwig W., 1907, loc. 760.
Friends, to Max B., 1907, loc. 727.
Stach, op. cit., loc. 6288.
Ibid., loc. 6297.
Ibid., loc. 6317.
Friends, to Elsa T., 1908, loc. 1015.
Stach, op. cit., loc. 6334.
Stach, op. cit., loc. 6301.
This is a fascinating and compelling is insight on Kafka "the man," as you write. Not a hot take, but you can really see how his desire for that "escapism" led to that pervasive theme of being "trapped" in so much of his work.
Thanks for sharing!
I enjoyed this! And thanks for the shoutout! Much appreciated.