Diaries of Franz Kafka

by Franz Kafka

  The whole has many points of contact with several chapters of ‘Description of a Struggle’, cf. especially that part of it called ‘Conversation with the Supplicant’. See also the sketch, ‘Unmasking a Confidence Trickster’, from Meditation.

  5. The poet Paul Claudel, who at that time was the French consul in Prague. Kafka never met him.

  6. Paul Wiegler, the translator of Moralités légendaires by Jules Laforgue. The reading of this translation (and later of the original as well) was an important experience for Kafka and the Editor.

  7. Kafka was survived by three sisters. All three sisters, including Kafka’s favourite, Ottla, and the larger part of their families, were killed by the Nazis.

  8. Oscar Baum, the blind author of Das Volk des harten Schlafes, one of the closest friends of Kafka and the Editor.

  9. The paragraph ending at this point was crossed out by Kafka.

  10. A reminiscence of the journey to Paris during the previous year (1910).

  11. The title (Wie erlangt man Erkenntnisse der höherern Welten) of a book by Dr Rudolf Steiner.

  12. Another fragment of the story begun on this page.

  13. The diary of the Lugano–Erlenbach–Paris journey follows at this point in the manuscript. For the ‘Travel Diaries’, see this page.

  14. This entry is connected with the plan that Kafka and the Editor developed, during the Lugano–Erlenbach–Paris trip, to write together the novel, Richard and Samuel, one chapter of which has been preserved under the title, ‘The First Long Train Journey’. See The Penal Colony (New York, 1947), Appendix.

  15. Longen is the biographer of Jaroslav Hašek, author of The Good Soldier Schweik.

  16. The prayer that opens the service on the Day of Atonement.

  17. A Yiddish theatre troupe from Eastern Europe. The troupe performed in a small café. Another troupe had performed in the same café in 1910.

  18. ‘The Apostate’. It is probably not unjustified to see in the two figures described here, who act as a sort of chorus, the first sketch of the two ‘assistants’ in The Castle.

  19. A Czech folk dance.

  20. Mezuzah (‘doorpost’), a small roll of parchment inscribed with certain biblical verses (Deut. 6: 4–9, 11, 20) and encased in a small wood or metal box. It hangs on the doorpost of the home of every orthodox Jew.

  21. Preliminary work on the novel, Richard and Samuel. R. is the woman who appears in the first chapter as Dora Lippert.

  22. The Czech word pavlač means ‘balcony’ and has passed into the German of Prague and Vienna. It refers to the characteristic open balcony running the entire length of an upper storey on the side of a house facing the court.

  23. Kafka was actually twenty-eight years old at the time.

  24. Otto Brod, the writer, and brother of the Editor. The three of us took a trip together to Riva and Brescia in 1909. Otto Brod, his wife and child were murdered by the Nazis in 1944.

  25. The Editor’s future wife.

  26. A novel by Wilhelm Schäfer. Kafka had a great deal of respect for this writer. He later went over to the Nazis.

  27. One of Kafka’s sisters.

  28. A rough translation of the Yiddish would be: ‘crazy hothead’.

  29. ‘Enough for parnusse’, enough to live on.

  30. ‘The Aeroplanes at Brescia’. See The Penal Colony, Appendix.

  31. This entry appeared later, with a few changes and omissions, in Meditation, under the title, ‘Bachelor’s Ill Luck’. For the version Kafka published, in the translation of Willa and Edwin Muir, see The Penal Colony. The translation appearing here is by the Muirs, except in those places where the German text of the published version and the version in the Diaries differ.

  32. Written at the time Kafka was studying for his bar examination.

  33. Emil Utitz, later a professor of philosophy, a fellow student of Kafka’s at the Gymnasium.

  34. The family of Egon Erwin Kisch, author of Der rasende Reporter. His brother, Paul Kisch, studied Germanics.

  35. A toy through the aperture of which one perceived the successive positions of a figure affixed to a revolving wheel. It thus created the illusion of motion.

  36. An uneducated person. Kafka acquired this and similar expressions from his conversations with the actor Löwy.

  37. Felix Weltsch, the philosopher and author of Gnade und Freiheit.

  38. Properly, mohel – ’circumciser

  39. A novel by Emil Strauss, whom Kafka estimated highly.

  40. This entry, slightly changed, appeared under the title of ‘The Sudden Walk’, in Meditation. The translation is based on one made by the Muirs (see n. 31 above).

  41. Christian von Ehrenfels, the philosopher and originator of the Gestalt theory in psychology.

  42. Cf. this entry with ‘Resolutions’, in Meditation. The translation is based on one made by the Muirs (see n. 31 above).

  43. ‘Schlaflied für Mirjam’, by Richard Beer-Hofmann.

  44. In Hermann und Dorothea.

  45. From Goethe’s ‘Der Fischer’.

  46. The distinguished Viennese novelist Otto Stössl, of whom Kafka had a very high opinion.

  47. Willi Haas, the editor of Die Literarische Welt. At the time Kafka wrote this, Haas was editing Die Herderblätter in Prague, in which he published the first chapter of Richard and Samuel, and also some of Werfel’s early work.

  48. Kafka was then working on the novel, Amerika, the title of which at that time was Der Verschollene (The Man Who Disappeared).

  49. Written during the holiday trip to Weimar and the Harz Mountains (28 June to 29 July 1912).

  50. Kafka’s first published work, Meditation, which I had urged him very strongly to finish – or, rather, to put together out of his prose pieces that for the most part were already finished. In the middle of August he finally gave me the finished manuscript, which I sent off to the Rowohlt Publishers (Kurt Wolff). The book was published early in 1913.

  51. Two days earlier Kafka had met Miss F. B. of Berlin, later his fiancée.

  52. This entry is preceded by the complete draft of ‘The Judgement’.

  53. This entry is followed by the final version, untitled, of ‘The Stoker’, chapter one of Amerika.

  54. On a visit to F.B.

  55. Kafka’s governess in his childhood.

  56. The writer and critic Otto Pick, later editor of the Prager Presse.

  57. The very talented novelist and dramatist Ernst Weiss, who later was quite close to Kafka. His first novel, Die Galeere, was published in 1913. He fled to France in 1933 and took his own life when the Nazis occupied Paris.

  58. An anthology of Kierkegaard’s writings.

  59. Kafka’s trip to the Hartungen Sanatorium in Riva took place between this and the following entry.

  60. Kropotkin’s memoirs were among Kafka’s favourite books, as were the memoirs of Alexander Herzen.

  61. Of ‘The Metamorphosis’. In the next entry is probably to be found the germ of ‘The Hunter Gracchus’ (in the book The Great Wall of China), the scene of which is Riva.

  62. This remark which the boy addressed to Kafka was in commendation of the unhappy reading of Kleist’s Michael Kohlhaas that Kafka mentions in the entry of 11 December 1913. Kafka told this anecdote with so much humour that among his friends the boy’s remark became proverbial. Kafka said that the boy even added, quite precociously: ‘Very good!’ Whenever someone, haughtily, patronizingly, and with the air of a connoisseur, praised something he was entirely ignorant of, we liked to quote this ‘very good’ and everyone immediately knew what was meant.

  Actually, the quite unimportant incident of the reading was a much less melancholy affair than Kafka’s account would indicate. Kafka, needless to say, read wonderfully; I was present at the reading and remember it quite well. It was only that he had chosen a selection that was much too long, and in the end was obliged to shorten it as he read. In addition, there was the quite incongruous contrast between this great literature and the unin
terested and inferior audience, the majority of whom came to benefit affairs of this kind only for the sake of the free cup of tea that they received.

  63. A play by Paul Claudel. Fantl, as well as Claudel, belonged to the so-called Hellerau circle. In Hellerau, a garden suburb of Dresden, Jacques-Dalcroze had his school for dancing and rhythmic gymnastics. There, in 1913, Jakob Hegner founded his publishing house, around which a circle of writers and intellectuals gathered.

  64. A quotation from Das Erlebnis und die Dichtung, by Wilhelm Dilthey. Tellheim is the hero of Lessing’s Minna von Barnhelm.

  65. Kafka’s eldest sister.

  66. Czech writer and historian. Among other things he edited (in collaboration with Otto Pick) the Bohemian National Museum’s manuscript letters of the correspondence between Casanova and J. F. Opiz.

  67. This is the concluding entry of the seventh manuscript notebook of the Diaries. It began with the entry of 2 May 1913 (see this page).

  68. Robert Musil, who later won renown for his Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften, invited Kafka to collaborate in the publication of a literary magazine.

  69. This and the two entries that follow were written almost two months before the war broke out. Soon thereafter, when the Russians conquered part of Austria, we witnessed scenes very like those Kafka describes here.

  70. A preliminary sketch for The Castle; it was several years later that Kafka wrote the novel.

  71. Kafka quotes P.’s remark ironically; P. in his innocence compared that rather important artist, Alfred Kubin, with an illustrator of pornographic books called ‘Marquis Bayros’ who was in vogue at the time.

  72. The name of a theatre in a suburb of Prague.

  73. Kafka, too was buried in the same grave with his parents.

  74. E., several times referred to later, was the sister of F.B.

  75. Bl. was a friend of F.B.’s.

  76. After the first breaking-off of his engagement, Kafka went on a short trip to Denmark with Ernst Weiss and the latter’s friend.

  77. Probably Franziska, a novel by Ernst Weiss.

  78. Beginning with 16 February 1914, Kafka had been making his diary entries in two notebooks instead of one, alternating from one to the other. This first sentence of 31 July followed directly after the last sentence of 29 July (‘… I’ll have the time’) in the same notebook. The entries under 30 July were made in the other notebook.

  79. Czech for ‘cheers’.

  80. The Czech diminutive for Adalbert.

  81. Kafka had begun The Trial. Two years previously he had written ‘The Judgement’ and parts of Amerika.

  82. Part of the manuscript page has been torn off, leaving lacunae here and at the end of the entry of 25 October.

  83. A brother-in-law home from the front on leave.

  84. The two sentences in parentheses were added as a kind of footnote.

  85. Tabakskollegium, name of the place (in Königswusterhausen, near Berlin) where Friedrich Wilhelm I of Prussia informally consorted with his ministers and advisers over beer and tobacco.

  86. Published as a fragment in an appendix to the German edition of The Trial, under the title of ‘Fahrt zur Mutter’.

  87. Exegesis of ‘Before the Law’; ‘Before the Law’ was originally published in the collection, A Country Doctor, and then incorporated into chapter II of The Trial. The ‘Legend’ and its exegesis are published in Parables (No. 7, Schocken Library).

  88. Later published as ‘The Giant Mole’ in The Great Wall of China.

  89. This story has not been preserved.

  90. The Man Who Disappeared, the title Kafka first gave to Amerika.

  91. Miss F. R., a young woman from Lemberg whom Kafka met at a lecture course on world literature that I gave in a school for refugee Jewish children. Cf. also the entry of 14 April 1915, this page.

  92. The Assicurazioni Generali, an Italian insurance company; Kafka’s first job. The work cost him a great deal of effort.

  93. Not the ‘Investigations of a Dog’ in The Great Wall of China.

  94. We Zionists took advantage of the presence of Eastern European Jewish war refugees to hold discussion evenings; it was our purpose to clarify the relations between the Jews of the East and the West. Needless to say, there were many misunderstandings at first; later, however, a fruitful collaboration ensued, and a mutual tempering of our views.

  95. Kafka accompanied his elder sister Elli on a visit to her husband, a reserve officer, who had been moved up to the front.

  96. An excursion spot near Prague.

  97. A chance acquaintance we had made on our trip to Zurich in 1911 (see this page).

  98. An unfinished novel of mine.

  99. Georg Mordecai Langer of Prague. For years, in Eastern Europe, he had sought to lead the life of a Hasid; later he wrote in Czech, German and Hebrew on Kabbalah and related subjects. Among other things he published two small volumes of Hebrew poems.

  The wonder-rabbi mentioned here, a relative of the Zaddik of Belz, had fled with his disciples before the Russians from Grodek to Prague.

  100. A suburb of Prague.

  101. Rossmann and K. are the heroes of Amerika and The Trial, respectively.

  102. Gerti was Kafka’s niece, a child at the time. [The German word Pferdefuss means both the devil’s cloven foot and, colloquially, clubfoot – Trans.]

  103. A model of a trench on exhibition near Prague.

  104. A childhood friend of Kafka’s; cf. Kafka’s letters to him, in volume six of the first German edition (Schocken Verlag) of his works.

  105. Abraham Grünberg, a young and gifted refugee from Warsaw whom we saw a great deal of at the time. He died of tuberculosis during the war.

  106. Kafka gave a humorous report of his visit to Mrs M-T. Later he regretted his unintentional ridicule.

  107. A talmudic scholar belonging to the pious Lieben family of Prague. Only two members of this extensive family were saved from the horrors of the Nazi occupation – the scholar mentioned here and a boy in a Palestinian kibbutz.

  108. [Dream and weep, poor race of man, the way can’t be found – you have lost it. With ‘Woe!’ you greet the night, with ‘Woe!’ the day.

  I want nothing save to escape the hands that reach out for me from the depths to draw my powerless body down to them. I fall heavily into the waiting hands.

  Words slowly spoken echoed in the distant mountains. We listened.

  Horrors of hell, veiled grimaces, alas, they bore my body close-pressed to them.

  The long procession bears the unborn along.]

  109. Several entries in the octavo notebooks (see Postscript, this page] fill, chronologically, the gap that occurs at this point in the Diaries. These entries, however, have a different, more ‘objective’ character than the quarto notebooks of the Diaries; they are made up solely of short stories, the beginnings of stories, and meditations (aphorisms), but nothing that bears on the events of the day.

  110. A Prague writer who (with Hugo Salus) had exercised a great influence on the generation that preceded ours. His poetic drama (adapted from the Spanish), Don Gil von den grünen Hosen, was famous.

  111. This and a number of the succeeding entries are fragments of ‘In the Penal Colony’.

  112. The clause, ‘as if it bore witness to some truth’, was struck out by Kafka in the manuscript.

  113. Between this and the preceding entry the following occurred: the first medical confirmation was made of Kafka’s tuberculosis; he again decided to break off his engagement to F., took a leave of absence from his job, and went to live in the country, with his sister Ottla (in Zürau, Post Flöhau, about five kilometres east of Karlsbad). The trip to Ottla’s house took place on 12 September 1917.

  114. A nephew of Kafka’s. He was murdered by the Nazis.

  115. [The German word for atonement (Versöhnung) also means reconciliation – Trans.]

  116. Kafka’s second fiancée, Miss J. W. The engagement lasted only six months or so.

  117. A charact
er in Knut Hamsun’s Growth of the Soil, which Kafka was reading at the time. Kafka particularly loved and admired this writer.

  118. The twelfth manuscript notebook of the Diaries, which ends at this point, consists only of a number of loose leaves between covers. Much of it was torn out by Kafka and destroyed.

  119. Mrs Milena Jesenská, whose acquaintance Kafka made at the beginning of 1920. She was a clever, able woman of liberal views; an excellent writer. A very intimate friendship developed between her and Kafka, one full of hope and happiness at first but which later turned into hopelessness. The friendship lasted a little more than two years. In 1939 Mrs Jesenská was thrown into prison by the Nazis in Prague and murdered.

  120. The magazine of the Czech scout movement. All problems of education interested Kafka.

  121. ‘The Death of Ivan Ilyich’ by Tolstoy. This and his Folk Tales (‘The Three Old Men’, particularly), were great favourites of Kafka’s.

  122. Addressed to Milena Jesenská.

  123. This remark occurs in Kafka’s first book, Meditation, in the piece entitled ‘Bachelor’s Ill Luck’. Cf. also this page.

  124. The last clause of this sentence is a reference to a line in Kafka’s story, ‘A Country Doctor’.

  125. Joseph K., the hero of The Trial; the novel, written in 1914 and 1915, remained unpublished during Kafka’s lifetime.

  126. The seven ancient Jewish communities in Burgenland.

  127. The beginning of a polemic against Hans Blüher’s Secessio Judaica. Here Kafka throws up to Blüher the very faults Blüher maintains he finds in Jewish books.

  128. The name of one of the exhibiting painters.

  129. Makkabi was the name of a Zionist sports club. Selbstwehr was a Prague Zionist weekly. The Czech means: ‘I came to help you.’

  130. Der grosse Maggid (The Great Preacher), title of a book by Martin Buber on the hasidic Rabbi Dow Baer of Mezritch, a disciple of the Baal Shem.

  131. In south-eastern Bohemia, where Kafka was recuperating at his sister Ottla’s house.