Paris Brothels and Stolen Art: A Fragmented Journey
Wherein we follow Franz Kafka's whirlwind tour of Europe in 1911, his eyes darting from Parisian prostitutes to Swiss croupiers, capturing the weird, the mundane, and the profound in equal measure.
Imagine a gangly, neurotic 28-year-old Czech insurance clerk with a fondness for fruits, painting, and prostitutes, trundling along the streets of Paris, notebook in hand. Meet Franz Kafka on holiday.
In September 1911, in an effort to erase the memories of his first, unsuccessful trip to Paris, Kafka embarked on a grand European tour with his constant companion, Max Brod (who wrote his own diary entries on that same journey). The tour followed a trajectory of stops roughly along the Orient Express route—Prague, Munich, Zürich (Kafka repeatedly writes ‘Zürüch’), Lucerne, Milan, and Paris—interrupted by a brief cholera panic. Yet, this wasn’t just another trip. Compared to a typical travel guide, Kafka’s diary entries provided a more fascinating and chaotic account.
Kafka’s diary1 reads like chaotic cinematography—a ragged newsreel spitting out jump-cut notes. His entries are fragmented, telegraphic, leaping from one observation to the next with the restless energy of a hyper-caffeinated flâneur. When I think of Kafka’s diary of travels, a single word comes to mind: scattershot. It’s like a handheld camera (writing machine gun, anyone?), spitting out fragmented observations, capturing the flotsam and jetsam of existence, bouncing from one scene to another, recording snippets of dialogue, quarrels, hysterics, foot traffic, and bickering within a small frame overflowing with detail. Take, for instance, his observation of a croupier in Lucerne:
Croupiers in frock coats. Messieurs faites votre jeu—marquez le jeu—les jeux sont faits—sonts marqués—rien ne va plus. Croupiers with nickel-plated rakes on wooden rods. What they can do with them: Pull the money onto the right fields, separate it, pull money to themselves, catch money thrown by them onto the winning fields.
... A moment so vividly rendered that you can almost hear coins clinking and the murmurs of the surrounding crowd.
But Kafka wasn’t satisfied with a simple description; he transmuted people into caricatures, their noses ballooning outwards, charwomen into rouged flamingos, their lips stretched back to their earlobes... Consider this gentleman at the Teatro alla Scala: ‘Gentleman in the box opens his mouth while laughing all the way to a gold tooth in the back, which then holds the mouth open like that for a little while.’ Or this portrayal of a girl in a Parisian brothel:
The girl whose belly while she was sitting was without doubt unshapely over and between her outspread legs under her translucent dress, whereas when she stood up it dissipated like theater scenery behind veils and formed an ultimately tolerable girl’s belly.
It’s a clinical and surreal description, morphing a flesh-and-blood woman into a shifting oddity. Remember: before diving into diary-writing, Kafka dabbled in art, err... more like cartoons, exaggerated line drawings, caricatures. His notebooks’ subjects relied on a similar stretching of reality. In his early years, his ‘human figures’ were abstracted, often exaggerated for humorous or satirical effect. This same grotesque anatomy marked both his drawings and his early writings. A hyper-stylisation of the character’s body (Kafka was obsessed with anatomy) filtered through bizarre costumes and elaborate makeup. The prostitute is a real-life prostitute; the laughing man in the theatre box is laughing like a real-life laughing man in a theatre box; descriptions are based on bending reality to an absurd level, but without becoming unrecognisable.
And speaking of brothels (high art? well, gentlemen, a delicate matter!), Kafka’s reports of his non-adventures in the seedy underbelly of European capitals are hilariously awkward in their utter passivity: ‘The girls spoke their French like virgins.’ One can almost imagine Kafka paying more attention to their passé composé than their voluptuous forms. Then: ‘An imperious monumental figure, pushing the money just earned into her stocking.’ A moment straight out of a Toulouse-Lautrec painting, captured in a few deft strokes of Kafka’s pen.
But not all are tits and giggles. Kafka’s description of the Milan Cathedral is particularly striking: ‘The cathedral is importunate with its many spires.’ In a few words, he captures the splendour of the edifice while also revealing an undercurrent of annoyance at its brazen flamboyance. It’s like he’s saying, ‘Oi, Cathedral, stop showing off!’—which is somewhat ironic for a resident of ‘the city of a thousand spires’.
In Paris, Kafka’s attention is caught by the city’s distinctive features:
the lines of Paris: the tall thin chimneys growing out of the flat chimneys (with the many little flower-pot-like ones), the extremely silent old gas candelabra, the horizontal lines of the blinds, which in the suburbs are joined by the streaks of dirt on the outside wall of the house, the thin molding on the roofs, which we saw on rue Rivoli, the lines of the glass roof of the Grand Palais des Art, the windows of the business premises divided by lines, the lattices of the balconies, the Eifel Tower [sic] formed out of lines...
It’s a list that has the effect of a cubist painting, fragmenting the cityscape into geometric elements.
Naturally, no Parisian trip would be whole without a detour to the Louvre. But in true Kafka style, he zooms in not on the masterpieces adorning the walls (a list he delivers with scant commentary) but on the empty space where the Mona Lisa should have been... He notes with typical dry humour: ‘Crowd in the Salon Carré, excited mood, standing in groups as if the Mona Lisa had just been stolen.’ The irony, of course, is that it had been stolen—just three weeks earlier! (hence the bullet-proof and humidity-controlled plexiglass casing it’s kept in nowadays).
Kafka also turns his gaze to the streets of Paris and its inhabitants. For example, an accident between a motorcycle and a baker’s tricycle. This amusing scene fascinates Kafka to the highest degree, which he reports with the precision of a court bailiff (an occupational defect, coming from an insurance lawyer? ) and the timing of a comic sketch. The scene unfolds in stages:
The baker’s assistant who until now has been driving along on this vehicle belonging to the ——— company in a completely carefree manner with that ponderous rocking peculiar to three-wheelers, dismounts, walks up to the motorist, who likewise dismounts, and levels reproaches at him that are dulled by the respect for an automobile owner and spurred on by the fear of his boss...
then,
the spectators, who are already conferring about the price of the repair [...] remember that they could fetch a policeman. The baker’s boy who has fallen into a more and more subordinate position to the mo., is simply sent by him for a pol. and entrusts his tricycle to the protection of the mot.
and finally,
With the ponderousness of a construction worker the p. pulls an old dirty but blank sheet of paper out of his notebook, takes down the names of the inv. parties, writes down the baking company and to get it right walks around the tricycle while writing.
After this, the policeman gets into a muddle with his papers while making his report. The whole scene is a slice of bureaucratic farce right out of Kafka’s works, possibly even fitting for a Chaplinesque reel.
Yet the authentic Kafkaesque twist... Two Jewish civil servants from Prague, playing at speaking Czech, to avoid being fingered as German (there was a bit of Franco-German tension at the time, you see, World War I just a stone’s throw away). You can almost envision Kafka chuckling at the absurd theatre of it all. He would later continue the joke (and subtly allude to the Dreyfus affair) in one of his letters to Brod about a French history book he saw in a bookstore:
Colonel Arthur Boucher, La France victorieuse dans la guerre du demain. The author, a former chief of operations, states that if France is attacked, “she will know how to defend herself with an absolute certainty of victory” [elle saurait se défendre avec la certitude absolue de la victoire]. I wrote this down in front of a bookstore on the Boulevard St. Denis in my capacity as German literary spy. May it be useful to you.2
Kafka’s diary entries are peppered with such flashes of dry humour, sometimes when you least expect it. Here are his impressions of the métro parisien:
The noise of the metro was horrible when I rode it for the first time in my life from Montmartre to the great boulevards. Otherwise it’s not bad, even strengthens the pleasant calm feeling of speed. The Dubonnet advertisement is very well suited to being read, awaited and observed by sad and unoccupied passengers. Elimination of speech from the transportation system, since neither when paying nor when getting on & off does one have to speak. Because it is easily understood, the metro is the best opportunity for an expectant and frail foreigner to acquire the belief that at the first attempt he has correctly and quickly penetrated the essence of Paris. ———— One recognises the foreigners by the fact that up on the last landing of the metro stairs they no longer know their way around, unlike the Parisians they don’t disappear without transition from the metro into the street life.
This could’ve been penned just yesterday. I still recall those ‘Dubo, Dubon, Dubonnet’ ads plastered all over the underground tunnels (now gone in the aftermath of the ban on alcohol adverts everywhere). And just like the London Tube, the Paris Metro is still as deafening as ever.
But despite his sharp observations of the world around him, Kafka never loses sight of his neuroses and physical ailments. He painstakingly notes his digestive issues, his struggles with a natural diet (mainly nuts and fruit juice, it seems), and his relentless fatigue (possibly due to the above-mentioned diet?). At one point, he seems almost gleeful when a doctor can’t quite figure out what’s wrong with his heart: ‘Pleasant feeling when the doctor listened to my heart again and again, kept wanting my body in a different position and could not sort things out.’
An important point I have not mentioned so far is that this trip was not just a whim or a simple vacation for Kafka. He and Brod had grand plans to revolutionise the travel guide industry with a (cheap) series cheekily titled On the Cheap. Taking inspiration from their own stingy Parisian escapade, they aimed to create brutally honest guidebooks that would tell travellers exactly where to find the most thrifty lodgings, meals, entertainment options and other boarding houses of all kinds—highlighting the essentials of a vagabond life across a smattering of the glitziest European cities. In short, crafting affordable travel guides for the cash-strapped youth yearning to set foot ‘On the Cheap’ in bustling metropolises like Berlin, Vienna, Prague, Paris, Rome, London—stop there, please. I love it! They even came up with a novel approach to language guides:
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 current use locally.3
Kafka’s radical, witty plan never came to fruition—like so many of his grandiose schemes—the On The Cheap guides never materialised. However, they did emerge, eventually, in the form of the Lonely Planet series and other similar guides. This concept captures Kafka’s unique mix of practicality and whimsy, his urge to comprehend (and maybe profit from) the chaotic world around him.
Little by little, as we follow Kafka’s trajectory through Montmartre, Zürüch’s (?) hollows, Milan’s Duomo, an image emerges in focus, framed by the seemingly disconnected entries of his journal. The picture of a strange dog nosing around this chaos and the infinite stench of the world… sniffing all corners and all scents with insatiable attentiveness. An outsider. A skilled observer. Detached. Cruelly funny. But possibly that’s the key, the unifying principle of Kafka’s travel journals — to capture the fragmented, transient nature of experience, the frenzy of fresh impressions bombarding the traveller without pause.
So next time you’re lurking in a Parisian café or trying to decode a street map in Milan, channel your inner Kafka. Seek out the odd, the bizarre: a golden molar, a sagging belly, those peculiar bits most people miss. You might not churn out The Metamorphosis but your view will indeed tilt into something fresh, slightly skewed.
And who knows? You might cook up a mad idea for a travel guide that could score you millions. Just don’t hold your breath for that advance payment...
To finish, and in case you missed them, a shout-out to
, , and for these recent and excellent Kafka-related articles:On Brod’s influence on Kafka’s legacy:
On how reading Kafka’s ‘Metamorphosis’ can bring comfort and energy:
On Samuel Beckett’s and Franz Kafka’s fundamental differences in their approaches to prose and emotional experience:
F. Kafka, Diaries, translated by Ross Benjamin, Schocken, 2022, pp. 503 sqq.
F. Kafka, Letters to Friends, Schocken, p. 75.
M. Brod, Franz Kafka, A Biography, ch. IV.