Between Goethe and Grete
Wherein we trace Kafka's attempts to find inspiration through literary fathers and female muses during a crucial period of creative paralysis.
Let’s go back to 1912. By March, Franz Kafka’s passionate affair with Jewish history and Yiddish theatre had begun to cool. For months, he had thrown himself into this world, befriending the actor Jizchak Löwy and defending Yiddish culture against Prague’s German-speaking establishment. But now, something had shifted. His diary captures this cooling of ardour with blunt simplicity: ‘Coolness toward Löwy for two days. He asks me about it. I deny it.’1 A few weeks earlier, he had noted his ‘susceptibility to the Jewishness in these plays abandons me, because they are too monotonous and degenerate into a wailing.’
In place of this waning theatrical obsession came something equally consuming: Goethe. Kafka immersed himself in everything Goethe-related with an intensity that almost overwhelmed his own writing. (This, by the way, sounds like my own situation regarding Kafka!) His diary entries from this period paint a picture of a man drowning in admiration. He devoured biographical works—Goethe’s Conversations, Student Years, Hours with Goethe, A Stay of Goethe’s in Frankfurt—with such zeal that it left him creatively paralysed. ‘The zeal with which I read about Goethe,’ he confessed, ‘permeates me and keeps me from doing any writing.’
This literary hero-worship manifested itself in peculiar ways: Kafka found himself compulsively reading aloud to others, despite his perceived inadequacy at this task: ‘I content myself with reading badly to everyone except my sisters,’ he wrote, adding with characteristic self-awareness, ‘my vanity... shows itself in that I feel hurt when someone finds fault with what is read, I turn red and want to read on quickly.’
Despite all this, Max Brod was pushing him to prepare his early prose pieces for publication in what would become the Contemplation collection. But Kafka’s response reveals his deep-seated anxiety about public exposure. In a letter to Brod, he worried: ‘I am unable and in the near future will scarcely be able to complete the remaining pieces... would you really advise me—and how could it possibly be justified?—to have something bad published with my eyes open, something which would then disgust me, like the “Conversations” in Hyperion?’2 (read: ‘Description of a Struggle’).
This wasn’t false modesty; his diaries from the period are filled with expressions of genuine creative crisis: ‘Hold fast to the diary from today on! Write regularly! Don’t give up! Even if no salvation comes’. And then, ‘1 June 1912 Wrote nothing’ followed by ‘2 June (1912) Wrote almost nothing’ and finally ‘7 June (1912). Awful. Wrote nothing today. No time tomorrow’3. All that while, he was still writing, of course… But his output was a mere trickle compared to Goethe’s great literary flood.
So, it was against this backdrop of creative semi-paralysis that Kafka and Brod embarked on their journey to Weimar, the town of Schiller and Goethe. The trip was obviously a literary pilgrimage, but it would take an unexpected turn. They arrived at midnight, standing before ‘the house of a literary forebear. Its wide, impressive facade dominates a small-town square.’4
In the Goethe House, Kafka encountered something that momentarily displaced his literary anxieties: Margarethe (Grete) Kirchner, the sixteen-year-old daughter of the house’s caretaker. His pursuit of her became almost ridiculous in its intensity, recorded in detail in his diaries. ‘Confirmation of the promised rendezvous with a loud yes,’ he wrote hopefully. ‘She was looking out the door... I asked once again: “Even if it’s raining?” “Yes.”’5
But she didn’t come.
Didn’t sleep in the afternoon in order to keep an eye on the uncertain weather. She didn’t come to the rendezvous.—Meet Max dressed in bed. Both unhappy. If one could pour the sorrow out the window.
Their interactions, when they did occur, were charged with an awkwardness that Kafka recorded with painful precision. ‘One-hour walk with Grete,’ he wrote,
She apparently comes with the consent of her mother, with whom she still speaks from the street through the window. Pink dress, my little heart. Restlessness because of the big ball in the evening. Had no relationship to her. Broken-off, constantly resumed conversation. Walking now especially fast, then especially slow again. Straining not to let it become clear at any price how we are connected by not one little thread.
Not one little thread. Cupid works in mysterious ways... Nevertheless, the final encounter was particularly poignant: ‘I say goodbye forever. She doesn’t know and if she did know, it wouldn’t matter to her at all. A woman bringing roses even disturbs the little goodbye.’
What are we to make of this peculiar episode with Margarethe? On the surface, it appears to be a simple infatuation—a 29-year-old man’s crush on a pretty teenager. But Kafka’s diaries reveal something more complex at work. His attraction to Grete seems inextricably linked to her proximity to Goethe’s legacy. She wasn’t just any girl; she was the girl who lived and breathed in Goethe’s space, who had daily access to the sanctum sanctorum of German literature. When Kafka reports giving her ‘the box of chocolates entwined with the little heart and the chain,’ we might read it as an offering, an attempt not just to win her affection but to establish a tangible connection to the literary greatness that surrounded her. This, even though Kafka’s relationship with Goethe was complex: while he venerated the master, the literary father figure, he also considered him a crushing symbol, noting that Goethe ‘probably holds back the development of the German language by the force of his writing.’ This included him, of course. And by now, we know paternal figures don’t sit well with Kafka.
Moreover, this pattern of seeking romantic connections that might serve as bridges to something greater would repeat itself throughout Kafka’s life and work. His relationships often seem charged with symbolic significance beyond mere romantic attraction. We see this dynamic crystallised most clearly in The Castle, where K.’s relationship with Frieda is complicated by her connection to Klamm, the mysterious castle official. K. is drawn to Frieda partly because she represents a potential link to the authority and power he desperately seeks to access. The castle itself—remote, imposing, overwhelming, perpetually out of reach—bears more than a passing resemblance to the towering figure of literary achievement that Kafka measured himself against.
In this light, Kafka’s pursuit of Grete is of curious significance. His awkward attempts at courtship, the carefully orchestrated ‘accidental’ meetings, even his final dejected farewell—all suggest someone seeking not just love but legitimacy, not just a girlfriend but a kind of literary apostolic succession. This double nature of his attraction, both romantic and aspirational, helps explain the peculiar tone of his diary entries about her, which oscillate between genuine tenderness and a strange detachment as if he’s simultaneously pursuing and observing himself pursuing.
From Weimar’s emotional turbulence, Kafka retreated to the Jungborn sanatorium in the Harz Mountains. Here, amid the peculiar, cult-like rituals of early twentieth-century nudism, hydrotherapy, mud packs, and vegetarian diet, he found himself confronting both physical and literary exposure. His diary entries from this period oscillate between discomfort and amusement, painting a vivid picture of this ‘well-directed institute’ where guests were encouraged to walk naked regardless of weather or season.
Initially, Kafka maintained his modesty, becoming known as ‘the man with the swimming trunks.’ His observations of his fellow guests are both comical and quietly horrified: ‘Now and then I get slight superficial nausea when, albeit usually at some distance, I see these completely naked people moving slowly past among the trees. Their running doesn’t make it better.’
Even at night, the peculiarity of the place was nightmare-inducing: ‘The noise made by the rabbits running by. When I get up at night, 3 of those rabbits are sitting on the meadow outside my door. I dream that I hear Goethe declaiming, with an infinite freedom and arbitrariness.’ This surreal detail—Goethe’s voice haunting his dreams—suggests how thoroughly literary ambition had penetrated his consciousness. And to worsen his already vulnerable state, Kafka also turned to Flaubert (another literary father figure), bringing L'Éducation sentimentale to read.
Despite the distractions of nude gymnastics and evangelical naturists (one memorable entry describes ‘old gentlemen who jump naked over haystacks’ which ‘don’t appeal to me either’), he tried somewhat to maintain his literary pursuits. Writing to Brod, he confessed: ‘I write little up to eight o’clock, but after eight, nothing, in spite of my then feeling most liberated.’
At the time, he had started to work on his novel about America (later known as The Man Who Disappeared), but this was proving particularly troublesome. ‘The novel is so huge,’ he complained to Brod, ‘as if sketched across the whole sky (also as colorless and vague as today’s), and I get in a tangle with the very first sentence I want to write.’ Nowadays, we’d call this writer’s block.
Returning to Prague after his summer vacation, Kafka found himself once again wrestling with his creative demons, and his usual anxieties returned: ‘Useless day,’ ‘Nothing, nothing,’ ‘Have written nothing for so long. Begin tomorrow. Otherwise I’ll end up in a prolonged inexorable dissatisfaction; I’m actually already in it.’ Meanwhile, his days were filled with the mundane obligations of office work and the asbestos factory visits, where he ‘breathed in gas for 2 hours in the engine room. The energy of the foreman and the stoker before the engine, which for an undiscoverable reason won’t ignite. Wretched factory.’ Note that this stoker figure will be a major inspiration for the opening scene of The Man Who Disappeared. We’ll get back to this soon enough.
On the literary front, the preparation of Contemplation weighed particularly heavily on him: ‘How much harmful ridiculous self-confidence arises while reading old things with an eye to publication,’ he lamented. ‘That keeps me from writing. And yet I have in reality achieved nothing, the disturbance is the best proof of that.’ His correspondence with Brod during this period is in the same vein, revealing both his creative paralysis and his perfectionism. ‘I am still a very long way from being able to show you what I am writing now,’ he explained. ‘It is being worked in small pieces, more strung together than interwoven, and will go on straight ahead for a long while before it gets around to turning in the still highly desired circle.’ The metaphor is telling—Kafka saw his work as requiring a perfect circular completion that constantly eluded him. That castle in the mist again...
On August 7, he finally declared that he couldn’t ‘clean up the remaining little pieces, don’t want to force myself and therefore will not publish the book.’ Yet just a week later, he drafted a letter to the publisher Ernst Rowohlt (Brod had made the introductions a few weeks earlier): ‘I am submitting here the little prose pieces you wished to see; they probably amount to a little book. As I was assembling them for this purpose, I sometimes had a choice between the appeasement of my sense of responsibility and the yearning to have a book of my own.’
Yet, this period of creative struggle was about to give way to something extraordinary. In late August, at Max Brod’s house, Kafka would meet a young woman from Berlin named Felice Bauer. This encounter would mark the beginning of a new chapter in his life. Just weeks after meeting Felice, Kafka wrote ‘The Judgment’ in a single night-long sitting—but that’s another story for an upcoming essay.
For now, we might reflect on these summer months of 1912, when Kafka oscillated between paralysis and potential, between the overwhelming shadow of his literary heroes (Goethe, Flaubert) and his own emerging voice. His Contemplation collection, born from this period of uncertainty, offers fascinating glimpses into a writer still finding his way. I encourage you to read these early pieces (available in this PDF, pp. 404-433) before my next episode. Until then…
And while you’re here, here’s a short piece by
on The Castle and the complexities of modern governance. Timely…Diaries, trans. Ross Benjamin, Fifth Notebook.
Letters to Friends, 1912.
Diaries, Sixth Notebook.
Stach, The Decisive Years, ch. 5.
Diaries, June-July 1912 Trip.