The Brooklyn Rail

Why am I reading Franz Kafka’s diary? Not that I’m really reading it—but for those with better German, it won’t be difficult to parse the lively script strafing the pages of about four dozen of the writer’s notebooks, journals, letters, and postcards currently on view at the Morgan Library. “It looks so modern,” a friend said, peering at the handwriting. We were standing by a display case holding the model of an apartment in which the Kafka family lived: two parents, three daughters, one son. Franz’s room, indicated by a red floor, is squeezed railroad-style next to his parents’ bedroom. On a nearby wall hangs Aphorism 16, one of the 109 gnostic assertions Kafka wrote after being diagnosed with tuberculosis, on stationary now quite yellowed and a century old: “Ein Käfig ging einen Vogel suchen” [A cage went in search of a bird].

The Morgan’s Franz Kafka show comes to New York from the University of Oxford’s Bodleian Libraries, possessors of the largest Kafka archive in the world. Other Kafka papers are held at the German Literature Archive in Marbach, and, after a years-long lawsuit, the National Library of Israel in Jerusalem—places never seen by Kafka himself, who was born into a German and Czech-speaking Jewish family in Prague in 1883, wrote The Metamorphosis, The Trial, The Castle, various short stories, aphorisms, and fragments, and died in Austria in 1924. The short version of the long tale of his posthumous popularity is that his friend and executor, the writer Max Brod, ignored Kafka’s request to destroy his papers, kept the papers, and kept getting him published, just as he had during the writer’s life, since Kafka was slow to share his work and constitutionally averse to self-promotion. After earning a law degree, he worked for the Austro-Hungarian state-sponsored Workers’ Accident Insurance Institute, trying to get factory owners to keep workers from dying and to compensate them when mangling occurred. He wanted to write; he was forced into a day job. Today, the industry of writers focusing on Kafka (novelists, academics, obsessives) produces an output whose volume exponentially exceeds Kafka’s surviving body of work.

The part of that body at the Morgan includes the original manuscript of The Metamorphosis. It sits in a clear case in a corner of the gallery; an open notebook, a methodically lined first page, the word Ungeziefer, which translators have so struggled to interpret (Insect, vermin, roach? Nearby is Nabokov’s 1946 copy of the published book, with a drawing of the beetle he transformed Gregor turned into). The show is worth visiting for that notebook alone, though there is much else to see.

The curators try to show Kafka in the round, organizing sections by what biographer Reiner Stach calls the “static” themes of Kafka’s existence, including fraught family relations, illness, Jewishness, work, literature. The show opens with a facsimile of a sheet from Kafka’s anguished 1919 Letter to the Father (a hundred-odd pages, unsent—his mother intercepted it) and original mail from the various sanatoria members of the Bohemian bourgeoisie visited for health and relaxation. From wall texts, we learn that Kafka was a believer in the insane-sounding “Fletcherism” method, wherein every mouthful of food must be chewed to pulp, and a vegetarian who doodled charmingly and once signed off as “Corn Salad sends his regards.” There’s a single photo Kafka may have taken, striking by accident or design: five people by a farm building, seeming to hover above their own reflections in a silver puddle. In another picture, Franz stands with his favorite sister, Ottla, in an open doorway, dark against the pale wall.

Kafka’s shifting relationship to Jewishness is well documented; unconvinced by his father’s obligatory Judaism, in his twenties he fell in love with the scrappy Yiddish theater productions passing through Prague, seeing in them a vitality he felt himself to lack. The show includes theater programs and posters, as well as Kafka’s German-Hebrew vocabulary notebook and a letter to one of his Hebrew instructors, Puah Ben-Tovim, on whom he had a crush.

Kafka was as ambivalent about Palestine as he was about everything else except literature, and he never went there, but the trips he did make are well-represented in the show. Office-bound throughout the year, he saved up vacation days for train trips across Europe, often with Brod, and pretty picture postcards close out the exhibition—tourist images of Venice, Vienna, Marienbad, Lake Lugano, Lake Garda, Versailles. Toward the end of his life, he finally broke away from Prague and moved to Berlin, living there with a younger woman, Dora Diamant; a letter from Diamant to Ottla is also on display. After Kafka died, she wound up in a Soviet labor camp, then London; all of Kafka’s sisters died in the Holocaust.

Around all these products and byproducts of a life is the thickener, Kafka’s context, considered helpful to twenty-first-century visitors who’ve been swimming in Kafka all along but are muddy on the facts. The curators contend with the challenge all archival exhibitions face: how to make these objects, mostly paper, intelligible and interesting? Their choices gesture toward entertainment; the show includes a 1930 British publication straightforwardly titled The Cockroach: Its Life-History and How to Deal With It; near the actual manuscript of The Castle is a model of a Spanish architect’s cuboid 1960s behemoth called Kafka’s Castle. There are also samples from the Kafka cult: a children’s book, a translation, a graphic novel, a biography, Warhol’s blue silkscreen of Kafka’s face, emptied of the aura that persists around the notebooks. And ultimately it’s aura we’re after—thus the not-really-defensible impulse to read writers’ diaries, catalogue their crushes, collect their scribbles like the skins of saints. Because despite all the worldly detritus (Corn Salad!) that proves otherwise, we remain secretly convinced that they were always living in a separate realm, unreachable. There is always a longing to be admitted.