Book review: Reassessing Kafka 100 years on

By Nicolas Mahler

Pushkin Press, pb, £12.99

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Kafka, one of the greatest Jewish writers of the 20th century, died 100 years ago. Most of us have a clear image of Kafka the man and the writer: anxious, preoccupied with his dominating father, someone who wrote dark books about guilt, alienation, bureaucracies which anticipated the totalitarian regimes soon to come, terrible relations between fathers and sons.

What is so interesting about his newly translated diaries is that they open up fascinating new perspectives on Kafka’s life and work that challenge our assumptions and make us look at Kafka very differently.

The Diaries are translated by Ross Benjamin, a much-acclaimed American translator of German literature, who has previously translated more than a dozen works, including Joseph Roth’s novel Job and Hölderlin’s Hyperion.

Between 1909 and 1923 Kafka kept various notebooks that he called his Tagebucher or “diaries”. The timing is significant. 1909 was the year of Kafka’s debut as a published author. It was the year he published eight prose pieces, in the Munich literary journal Hyperion, which later became part of his first published book, Betrachtung (1912). He was only in his mid-twenties, barely out of university. 1923, when the diaries stop, was the year before Kafka’s death. These diaries cover his literary career.

These are not conventional diaries, however. They are made up of all kinds of different writing: literary sketches, drafts of letters, reviews, accounts of dreams, descriptions of people he knew, mostly Czech Jews, drawings by Kafka, accounts of his travels, snapshots of his family and life in early 20th- century Prague.

This new translation is based on the German critical edition first published in 1990 and is very different from the first English version, published in 1948-9, based on the original German version edited by Max Brod, Kafka’s close friend and literary executor. Benjamin is scathing about Brod’s “inadequacies, inaccuracies, and distortions”, in particular how Brod suppressed sexual references, imposed “an artificial chronology on the entries” and created a “sanctified” image of Kafka that endured for years. Above all, Benjamin has set out to give us a front row-seat reading about Kafka as he tries to find his voice as a writer.

The book is enormous. The diaries are almost 600 pages in small print and are followed by almost 80 pages of superbly researched notes. What is perhaps most surprising is how rarely Kafka refers to some of his best-known works, especially The Castle, In the Penal Colony, Metamorphosis and The Trial.

But The Diaries are fascinating about Kafka’s thoughts about himself as a writer. He is frequently self-critical. In 1914 he describes reading In the Penal Colony aloud to a group including Brod and Franz Werfel. “[N]ot completely dissatisfied,” he writes, “but for the blatant ineffaceable flaws.” He is just as critical of Metamorphosis: “[I] find it bad,” then a little later, “Unreadable ending. Imperfect almost to its depths.”

Sometimes this self-criticism borders on depression, even anguish. In August 1914 he writes, “Cold and empty. I feel all too keenly the limits of my ability.” Three months later, he writes, “I can no longer go on writing.” Two days later, he writes, “In complete helplessness wrote barely 2 pages.”

But then a few weeks later he describes an extraordinary burst of productivity: “Unfinished things I’ve worked on: The Trial, Memories of the Kalda Railroad, The Village Schoolteacher, The Assistant Prosecutor… Finished only: In the Penal Colony and a chapter of The Missing Person…” Elsewhere he describes writing one of his greatest short stories, “This story, The Judgment, I wrote at one stretch on the night of the 22 and 23 from 10 o’clock in the evening until 6 o’clock in the morning.”

It’s not just the speed of the writing that is so striking. There is the fascinating preoccupation with his body (and, of course, with the bodies of his characters): “My legs had grown so stiff from sitting that I could hardly pull them out from under the desk. The terrible strain and joy, how the story unfolded itself before me… Several times last night I bore my weight on my back.” He goes on, ““[T]he story came out of me like a veritable birth covered with filth and slime and only I have the hand that can penetrate to the body and has the desire to do so.” It is as if Kafka, in all his strangeness, has suddenly appeared before our very eyes.

At other times, we get intriguing glimpses of Kafka’s views of his characters. “Rossmann and K.,” he writes, contrasting the central characters of Amerika and The Trial, the innocent one and the guilty one, in the end, both killed in punishment without distinction, the innocent one with a lighter hand, more pushed aside than struck down.”

Above all, there are Kafka’s thoughts about different aspects of what he calls “the Jewish question”. There is his fascinating encounter with a Yiddish theatre group from eastern Europe, his reflections on Zionism and the contrast between west and east European Jewish culture.

A very different book marking this special centenary is a short “comic biography”, Completely Kafka by Nicolas Mahler, an Austrian cartoonist and illustrator, known for his comics and for his graphic adaptations of famous works by Joyce and Proust, among others. Much the best thing about the book are the charming black and white drawings. The best are the drawings of Kafka himself, drawn in thick brushstroke. Some are like cartoons, a few are more like Kafka’s own drawings, angular, isolated. But it is a slight work, with short summaries of the best-known works and the main relationships in Kafka’s life. Unfortunately, it recycles familiar stories about Kafka and offers few new insights. There is almost nothing about Kafka’s Jewishness or antisemitism in Prague.

But we should end on a more positive note. A century after his death, a new generation of scholars and translators are producing a very different image of Kafka’s life and work.

A new, much more complicated and interesting Kafka is emerging and Benjamin’s translation of Kafka’s diaries is an indispensable contribution to our new understanding of this extraordinary writer. This is one of the books of the year. Perhaps that is an understatement. It might be one of the books of my lifetime.