Kafka's Second Life
Wherein we delve into the diaries of a young Franz Kafka. It’s Prague, 1910, and anxieties abound. Body horror? Check. Creative constipation? Check. Bad trip to Paris? Oh, yeah.
Before we took our detour to Prague, we left Kafka at the end of 1909, when he published his early reportage about the Brescia airshow. So now, let’s resume our exploration of Kafka’s early years.
In the early months of 1910, Kafka, spurred on by his toady, Max Brod, took up a new practice which would give his writing a definite leg-up: keeping a diary. Actually, he kept several diaries—if you read Ross Benjamin’s recent translation (based on the 1990 Hans-Gerd Koch edition), you’ll soon realise that Kafka was writing in several journals simultaneously, often jumping around between them and scribbling down the tiniest detail. Many entries are undated or incomplete. Once decoded and pieced together, however, these diaries reveal Kafka’s everyday mundanities, from what he had for lunch to the plays he watched at the cabarets to the books he read, yodel-ay, yodel-ay...
But the most striking aspects include his fragmented reflections, thoughts, dreams, struggles, where he dissects his physical and creative anxieties. In a phantasmagorical image, he depicts his inner turmoil as Japanese acrobats hanging in mid-air, ‘climbing a ladder that isn’t resting on the ground but on the upturned soles of a partner lying on his back and isn’t leaning against a wall but goes straight up into the air.’ In another, he writes: ‘My condition is not unhappiness, but it’s not happiness either… For whatever things occur to me occur not from the root, but beginning somewhere toward their middle.’ A cryptic comment, I know, but one which describes exactly Kafka’s method: always writing from the middle, starting in medias res, and where no discernible resolution can ever be reached.
In his diaries and letters of this period, Kafka also recounts dreams that seem to foreshadow images we’ll see in his fiction: after a Paris trip with the Brod brothers in October 1910, which was cut short by the painful eruption of a carbuncle on his back and botched medical interventions, he was afflicted with nightmares. ‘I dreamt that I had been quartered for the night in a large building that consisted of nothing but Paris cabs, automobiles, omnibuses, etc., which had nothing to do but drive close by each other, over each other, under each other, and nobody talked or thought about anything but fares, junctions, connections, tips, directions, cambios, counterfeit money, etc.’—a powerful image that anticipates the phantasmic car traffic scenes in Kafka’s novel Amerika (Der Verschollene).
In these notebooks, we also witness Kafka’s complex relationship with his body. He meticulously logs his physical condition as if detailing a patient’s symptoms: ‘my calves are good, my thighs not bad, my belly is passable, but my chest is very shabby.’ One could mistake this for a form of narcissism, but a short while later, he adds, ‘if I were missing my upper lip here, an ear there, a rib here, a finger there, if I had hairless spots on my head and pockmarks on my face, it still wouldn’t be an adequate counterpart to my inner imperfection.’ This self-disgust, both physical and mental, would later manifest in Gregor Samsa’s grotesque transformation—but let’s not get ahead of ourselves… Needless to say, Kafka’s letters to Brod also offer a window into this self-perception: ‘Everything I possess is directed against me… I am nothing but a mass of spikes going through me.’
All these notes from 1910 to 1911 were written while Kafka was trapped at the AUVA, examining the human cost of industrialisation by day and retreating into his diary entries at night. The physical injuries he had to deal with in his professional reports surely had an influence on his intimate body perception.
Another fascinating aspect of these notebooks is the various drafts of letters or stories Kafka tried to compose. Sometimes, he would rewrite and retweak the same paragraph multiple times in a row or over several days and weeks. At this point, Kafka was still refining ‘Description of a Struggle’ and had started sketching a new story, ‘The Urban World’, where the character’s tense relationship with his father resembled his own. This piece was a precursor to ‘The Judgement’, which he would write several months later, on the night of 22 September 1912 (more on that later).
And yet, writing presented Kafka with both solace and torment. Days went by in frustrated silence, every sentence a source of doubt and torment: ‘My whole body warns me against every word; every word, before it lets me write it down, first looks around in all directions. The sentences literally crumble before me; I see their insides and then have to stop quickly.’ Kafka frequently personified words and textual fragments as living entities he sought to animate, or adversaries to be wrestled with, beasts to be tamed, like some demonic Golems. Nevertheless, these reflections also conveyed his profound dissatisfaction with his creations and the immense pressure he placed on himself in his quest for literary perfection. He yearned for a tyrannical muse to drive him onward, an ‘invisible tribunal’ to flog him into action like a beast of burden. His writer’s block wasn’t merely a question of wrestling with the blank page. It arose from a fear of facing the forces he intuited brooding within, the unsettling truths that could solely be probed in the solitude of his night-time writing sessions.
Indeed, Kafka’s nocturnal habits were more than just a quirk—Kafka wasn’t some Nosferatu. Daytime—with its professional demands and family distractions—stifled his creativity. The night, on the other hand, was a realm of possibility, allowing him to delve deeply into his subconscious, but often leading to exhaustion: ‘Wretched, wretched and yet well meant,’ he writes in December 1910, ‘Yes, it’s midnight, but since I’ve slept very well, that is an excuse only insofar as during the day I would have written nothing at all.’
In his ‘travel notebooks,’ Kafka also describes a business trip to Friedland in January 1911 for a factory inspection. He depicts Schloß Friedland as a sprawling, ivy-choked structure perched atop a hill. Kafka was captivated: ‘Surprisingly built one part above another,’ he noted in his diary, ‘still far from orderly.’ He was drawn to the castle’s contradictions—its decaying grandeur, its air of impenetrable mystery. Staircases that led nowhere. A drawbridge hung ‘neglected from its hooks’. This wasn’t just a picturesque ruin. This vivid imagery illustrates how Kafka would transform this experience into the surreal landscape of The Castle—which in turn would become an inspiration for other 20th-century artists.
This was also the period in which Kafka’s intellectual curiosity led him to dabble in various philosophical and spiritual movements. For example, in early 1911, he attended a lecture by Rudolf Steiner, an Austrian occultist known for his esoteric spiritual movement known as ‘anthroposophy’. Steiner claimed to provide a roadmap to unlocking the ‘untapped hidden powers’ within individuals (a kind of Scientologist of his era, one might argue). For a brief time, Kafka was captivated by the promise of spiritual enlightenment and possibly saw parallels between Steiner’s ideas and his own belief in the transformative power of writing. Yet, as his diary entries reveal, his meeting with Steiner didn’t make the best impression on him; he notes that Steiner ‘nodded from time to time, which he seems to consider an aid to strong concentration. At first a quiet cold bothered him, his nose was running, he kept working the handkerchief deep into his nose, one finger at each nostril.’ After this encounter, according to Reiner Stach’s biography, Kafka later dismissed theosophy as ‘a surrogate for literature’ (ch. 27). He understood that authentic self-realisation wasn’t to be found in esoteric doctrine but in the painstaking and often painful process of confronting his innermost complexities through the written word.
Ultimately, you won’t find charming anecdotes or grand pronouncements on the meaning of life in Kafka’s diaries. Nor was he out there chasing skirts or climbing the corporate ladder. Instead, we witness his struggle for artistic expression. It is raw and unfiltered, and by late 1911, Kafka’s meticulous documentation of his internal and external worlds would coalesce into a distinctive narrative voice. These diaries were not only a personal escape but also a testing ground for his major works. This period of intense introspection and observation offered the foundation for Kafka’s major leap forward in 1912 when he would pen some of his most famous texts: ‘The Judgment’ (Das Urteil), ‘The Stoker’ (Der Heizer)—later chapter one of The Man Who Disappeared (aka America), and ‘The Metamorphosis’ (Die Verwandlung). I’ll discuss these three essential stories soon. In short, these diaries grant us access to Kafka’s writing process and show us that sometimes, it is in the darkest moments that we find the most remarkable insights about ourselves and the world around us.