The Diaries of Franz Kafka

by Franz Kafka

  Schlaf. Doesn’t precisely live in a garret, as Ernst, who has fallen out with him, tried to persuade us. A man of great animation, his stout chest enclosed in a tightly buttoned jacket. His eyes only had a sick and nervous twitch. Talked mostly of astronomy and his geocentric system. Everything else, literature, criticism, painting, still clung to him only because he hadn’t thrown it off. Besides, everything will be decided by Christmas. He hadn’t the slightest doubt of his victory. Max said his position in relation to the astronomers was similar to Goethe’s position in relation to the opticists. ‘Similar,’ he replied, continually taking hold of the table with his hand, ‘but much more favourable, for I have incontestable facts on my side.’ His small telescope for four hundred marks. He hadn’t needed it to make his discovery, or mathematics either. He is entirely happy. The sphere of his activity is infinite, for his discovery, once recognized, will have great consequences in every field (religion, ethics, aesthetics, etc.) and he will naturally be the first to be called upon to reinterpret them. When we arrived he had just been pasting notices published on the occasion of his fiftieth birthday into a large book. ‘On such occasions they go easy on one.’

  Before that, a walk with Paul Ernst in the Webicht. His contempt for the present, for Hauptmann, Wassermann, Thomas Mann. In a little subordinate clause which you only caught long after it was said, with no regard for what our opinion might be, he called Hauptmann a scribbler. Otherwise vague utterances on the Jews, Zionism, races, etc., in all of which he showed himself remarkable only as being a man who had energetically used his time to good purpose – Dry, automatic ‘yes, yes’ at short intervals when someone else was speaking. Once he repeated it so often that I no longer believed my ears.

  7 July. Twenty-seven, number of the porter in Halle – Now at half past six drop down on a long-sought bench near the Gleim Memorial. If I were a child, I should have to be carried, my legs ache so. No feeling of loneliness long after saying good-bye to you. And then fell into such an apathy again that it still wasn’t loneliness.

  Halle, a little Leipzig. These pairs of church towers here and in Halle which are connected by small wooden bridges in the sky. Even my feeling that you won’t read these things right away, but only later, makes me so uncertain – The cyclists’ club meeting on the market place in Halle for an excursion. How difficult it is to go sight-seeing in a city, or even along a single street, by oneself.

  A good vegetarian lunch. Unlike other innkeepers, it is just the vegetarian innkeepers with whom the vegetarian diet doesn’t agree. Timid people who approach from the side.

  Trip from Halle with four Jews from Prague: two pleasant, cheerful, robust elderly men, one resembling Dr K., one my father, but much shorter; then a weak-looking young married man, exhausted by the heat, and his dreadful, stoutly built young wife whose face was somehow derived from the X family. She was reading a three-mark Ullstein novel by Ida Boy-Ed with a gem of a title that Ullstein had probably thought up: One Moment in Paradise. Her husband asked her how she liked it. She had only begun it. ‘Can’t say just yet.’ A nice German with dry skin and a whitish-blond beard beautifully parted over his cheeks and chin took a noticeably friendly interest in everything that went on among the four.

  Railway hotel [in Jungborn], room down on the street with a little garden in front. Went off into the city. A thoroughly ancient city. Timber framework seems to be the type of construction calculated to last the longest. The beams warp everywhere, the panelling sinks in or buckles out, but the whole keeps together; at most it shrinks a little with time and becomes even more solid. I have never seen people leaning so beautifully in windows. The centre posts of most of the windows were immovable. People propped their shoulders against them, children swung from them. Sturdy girls were sitting on the bottom steps of the broad, landing of a staircase, the skirts of their Sunday dresses spread out around them. Drachenweg Katzenplan. In the park on a bench with some little girls; we called it a girls’ bench and defended it against some boys. Polish Jews. The children called them Itzig and didn’t want to sit down on the bench right after them.

  Jewish hotel N.N. with a Hebrew inscription. It is a neglected, castlelike building with a wide flight of stairs in front that stands out in the narrow streets. I walked behind a Jew who came out of the hotel and spoke to him. After nine. I wanted to know something about the community. Learned nothing. Looked too suspicious to him. He kept looking at my feet. But after all, I’m a Jew too. Then I can put up at N.N. – No, I already have a place to stay – So – Suddenly he moved close to me. Whether I wasn’t in Schöppenstedt a week ago. We said good-bye in front of the gate of his house, he was happy to be rid of me; without my even asking about it, he told me how to get to the synagogue.

  People in bathrobes on the doorsteps. Old, meaningless inscriptions. Pondered the possibilities offered me, on these streets, squares, garden benches, and brooksides, of feeling thoroughly unhappy. Whoever can cry should come here on Sunday. In the evening, after walking around for five hours, on the terrace of my hotel in front of a little garden. At the table near by the landlord’s family with a young, lively woman who looked like a widow. Unnecessarily thin cheeks. Hair parted and fluffed out.

  8 July. My house is called ‘Ruth’. Practically arranged. Four dormers, four windows, one door. Fairly quiet. Only in the distance they are playing football, the birds are loudly singing, several naked people are lying motionless in front of my door. All except me without swimming trunks. Wonderful freedom. In the park, reading room, etc., there are pretty, fat little feet to be seen.

  9 July. Slept well in the cabin, which is open on three sides. I can lean against my door like a householder. Woke up at all hours of the night and kept hearing rats or birds gurgling or flitting in the grass around the hut. The man who was freckled like a leopard. Yesterday evening lecture on clothing. The feet of Chinese women are crippled in order to give them big buttocks.

  The doctor, an ex-officer; affected, insane, tearful, jovial laughter. Buoyant walk. A follower of Mazdaznan. A face created to be serious. Clean-shaven, lips made to be compressed. He steps out of his examination room, you go past him to enter. ‘Please step in!’ he laughs after you. Forbade me to eat fruit, with the proviso that I needn’t obey him. I’m an educated man, I should listen to his lectures, they have even been published, should study the question, draw my own conclusions, and then act accordingly.

  From his lecture yesterday: ‘Though your toes may be completely crippled, if you tug at one of them and breathe deeply at the same time, after a while it will straighten out.’ A certain exercise will make the sexual organs grow. One of his health rules: ‘Atmospheric baths at night are highly recommended’ – (whenever it suits me, I simply slip out of bed and go out into the meadow in front of my cabin) – ‘but you shouldn’t expose yourself too much to the moonlight, it has an injurious effect.’ It is impossible to clean the kind of clothes we wear today!

  This morning: washing, setting-up exercises, group gymnastics (I am called the man in the swimming trunks), some hymn singing, ball playing in a big circle. Two handsome Swedish boys with long legs. Concert by a military band from Goslar. Pitched hay in the afternoon. In the evening my stomach so upset that out of irritation I refused to walk a step. An old Swede was playing tag with several little girls and was so caught up in the game that once, while running, he shouted: ‘Wait, I’ll block these Dardanelles for you.’ Meant the passage between two clumps of bushes. When an old, unattractive nursemaid went by: That’s something you could really tap on (her back, in the black dress with white polka dots). Constant, senseless need to confide in someone. Looks at each person to see whether there is a possibility there, and whether an opportunity will present itself.

  10 July. Sprained my ankle. Pain. Loaded new hay. In the afternoon walked to Ilsenburg with a very young Gymnasium professor from Nauheim; he may go to Wickersdorf148 next year. Co-education, nature cure, Cohen, Freud. Story about the group of boys and girls he took on an ex
cursion. Storm, everyone soaked through, had to strip completely in a room in the nearest inn.

  A fever during the night because of my swollen ankle. The noise the rabbits made running past. When I got up during the night three of these rabbits were sitting in the meadow in front of my door. I dreamt that I heard Goethe reciting, with infinite freedom and arbitrariness.

  11 July. Talked to a Dr Friedrich Sch., a municipal official of Breslau, had been in Paris for a long time to study municipal institutions. Lived in a hotel with a view into the court of the Palais Royal. Before that in a hotel near the Observatoire. One night there were two lovers in the next room. The girl shamelessly screamed with joy. Only when he spoke through the wall and offered to call a doctor did she grow quiet, and he was able to sleep.

  My two friends disturb me; their path goes past my cabin and they always pause a moment at my door for a short chat or an invitation to take a walk. But I am also grateful to them for it.

  In the Evangelischen Missionzeitung, July 1912, about missions in Java: ‘Much as may justly be urged against the amateur medical activities extensively engaged in by missionaries, it is nevertheless the principal resource of their missionary work and cannot be dispensed with.’

  When I see these stark-naked people moving slowly past among the trees (though they are usually at a distance), I now and then get light, superficial attacks of nausea. Their running doesn’t make things any better. A naked man, a complete stranger to me, just now stopped at my door and asked me in a deliberate and friendly way whether I lived here in my house, something there couldn’t be much doubt of, after all. They come upon you so silently. Suddenly one of them is standing there, you don’t know where he came from. Old men who leap naked over haystacks are no particular delight to me, either.

  Walked to Stapelburg in the evening. With two people I introduced and recommended to one another. Ruins. Back at ten. Some nudists prowling about among the haystacks on the meadow in front of my cabin, disappeared into the distance. At night, when I walked across the meadow to the toilet, there were three of them sleeping in the grass.

  12 July. Dr Sch.’s stories. Travelled for one year. Then a long debate in the grass on Christianity. Old, blue-eyed Adolf Just who cures everything with clay and warns me against the doctor who had forbidden me fruit. The defence of God and the Bible by a member of the ‘Christian Community’; as the proof he needed at the moment, he read a Psalm. My Dr Sch. made a fool of himself with his atheism. Foreign words – illusion, auto-suggestion – didn’t help him a bit. Someone we didn’t know asked how it was that everything goes so well with the Americans, though they swear at every second word. With most of them it was impossible to discover what their real opinions were, though they all took a lively part in the discussion. The one who spoke so passionately of Flower Day and how it was just the Methodists who held back. The one from the ‘Christian Community’ who lunches with his pretty little boy on cherries and dry bread wrapped in a small paper bag; otherwise he lies in the grass all day, three Bibles open before him, and takes notes. It has only been three years that he has been on the right path. Dr Sch.’s oil sketches from Holland. Pont Neuf.

  Two sisters, little girls. One with a narrow face, easy posture, nose coming delicately to a point, clear, not entirely candid eyes. Her face shone with so much intelligence that I found myself looking excitedly at her for several minutes. Something moved me when I looked at her. Her more womanly little sister intercepted my glances – A newly arrived prim miss with a bluish look. The blonde with short, dishevelled hair. Supple and lean as a leather strap. Coat, blouse, and skirt, nothing else. Her stride!

  With Dr Sch. (forty-three years old) on the meadow in the evening. Going for a walk, stretching, rubbing, slapping, and scratching. Stark naked. Shameless – The fragrance when I stepped out of the writing-room in the evening.

  13 July. Picked cherries. Lutz read Kinkel’s Die Seele to me. After eating I always read a chapter from the Bible, a copy of which is in every room. Evening, the children at play. Little Susanne von Puttkammer, nine years old, in pink drawers.

  14 July. Picked cherries on the ladder with a little basket. Was high up in the tree. Religious services in the morning on Eckarplätzen. Ambrosian chant. In the afternoon sent the two friends to Ilsenburg.

  I was lying in the grass when the man from the ‘Christian Community’ (tall, handsome body, sunburned, pointed beard, happy appearance) walked from the place where he reads to the dressing-cabin; I followed him unsuspectingly with my eyes, but instead of returning to his place he came in my direction, I closed my eyes, but he was already introducing himself: H., land surveyor, and gave me four pamphlets as reading matter for Sunday. When he left he was still speaking about ‘pearls’ and ‘casting’, by which he meant to indicate that I was not to show the pamphlets to Dr Sch. They are: ‘The Prodigal Son’, ‘Bought, or No Longer Mine (for Unbelieving Believers)’, ‘Why Can’t the Educated Man Believe in the Bible?’ and ‘Three Cheers for Freedom: But What Is True Freedom?’ I read a little in them and then went back to him and, hesitant because of the respect in which I held him, tried to make it clear why there was no prospect of grace for me at present. Exercising a beautiful mastery over every word, something that only sincerity makes possible, he discussed this with me for an hour and a half (towards the end an old, thin, white-haired, red-nosed man in linen joined in with several indistinct remarks). Unhappy Goethe, who made so many other people unhappy. A great many stories. How he, H., forbade his father to speak when he blasphemed God in his house. ‘Oh, Father, may you be stricken with horror, by your own words and be too terrified to speak further, I wouldn’t care one bit.’ How his father heard God’s voice on his deathbed. He saw that I was close to grace. I interrupted all his arguments and referred him to the inner voice. Successfully.

  15 July. Read Kühnemann’s Schiller – The man who always carries a, card in his pocket to his wife in case of accident – The Book of Ruth – I read Schiller. Not far away a naked old man was lying in the grass, an umbrella open over his head.

  Plato’s Republic – Posed for Dr Sch. – The page in Flaubert on prostitution – The large part the naked body plays in the total impression an individual gives.

  A dream: The sunbathers destroyed one another in a brawl. After the two groups into which they were divided had joked with one another, someone stepped out in front of one group and shouted to the others: ‘Lustron and Kastron!’ The others: ‘What? Lustron and Kastron?’ He: ‘Right.’ Beginning of the brawl.

  16 July. Kühnemann – Herr Guido von Gillshausen, captain, retired, writes poetry and music. A handsome man. Out of respect for his noble birth didn’t dare look up at him; broke out in a sweat (we were naked) and spoke too softly. His seal ring – The bowing of the Swedish boys – Talked in the park with my clothes on to a man with his clothes on. Missed the group excursion to Harzburg.

  Evening. Rifle meet in Stapelburg. With Dr Sch. and a Berlin hairdresser. The wide plain rising gently to the Burgberg, bordered by ancient linden trees, incongruously traversed by a railway embankment. The platform from which they shot. Old peasants made the entries in the scorebook. The three fife players with women’s kerchiefs hanging down their backs. Old, inexplicable custom. Several of them in old, simple blue smocks, heirlooms made of the finest linen and costing fifteen marks. Almost everyone had his gun. Muzzle-loaders. You had the impression that they were all somehow bent from work in the fields, especially when they lined up in double file. Several former meet-masters in top hats with sabres buckled round them. Horses’ tails and other old emblems were carried past; excitement; then the band played, greater excitement; then silence and drumming and fife playing, still greater excitement; finally, as the drums and fifes sounded for the last time, three flags were brought out, climax of the excitement. Forward march and off they went. Old man with a black suit, black cap, a somewhat pinched face, and a not too long, thick, silky, unsurpassable white beard encircling his face. The former champion
shot, also in a top hat and a sash like a curtain around his body; the sash had little metal shields sewn all over it on each of which was engraved the name of the champion of a given year together with the symbol of his trade. (The master baker had a loaf of bread, etc.) Marching off in the dust to music under the changing light of the thickly clouded sky. Doll-like appearance of a soldier marching with them (a rifleman now in the army) and his hopping step. People’s armies and peasant wars. We followed them through the streets. Sometimes they were closer, sometimes farther away, since they stopped at the houses of the various champion shots; played, and were given some refreshments. The dust cleared towards the end of the column. The last pair could be seen most distinctly. From time to time we lost sight of them entirely. Tall peasant with somewhat sunken chest, eternal face, top boots, clothes that seemed made of leather; how ceremoniously he detached himself from the gatepost. The three women who were standing one behind the other in front of him. The one in the centre dark and beautiful. The two women at the gate of the farmyard opposite. In each of the two farmyards there was a giant tree that united with the other above the wide road. The large targets on the houses of the former champions.

  The dance floor, in two parts, divided down the middle, the band in a fenced-off section having two rows of seats. Empty as yet, little girls slide across the smooth boards. (Chess players, relaxing from their play and talking, disturb me as I write.) I offer them my soda, they drink, the oldest first. Lack of a really common language. I ask whether they have already eaten dinner [genachtmahlt], complete lack of understanding; Dr Sch. asks whether they have already had supper [Abendbrot], they begin to have a vague understanding (he doesn’t speak clearly, breathes too hard); they are able to give an answer only when the hairdresser asks whether they have had their grub [gefuttert]. They didn’t want the second soda I ordered for them, but they wanted to ride on the merry-go-round; I, with the six girls (from six to thirteen) around me, flew to the merry-go-round. On the way the girl who suggested the ride boasted that the merry-go-round belonged to her parents. We sat down and went around in a coach. Her friends around me, one on my knees. Girls crowding about who wanted to have some fun out of my money too, but my girls pushed them away against my will. The proprietor’s daughter superintended the reckoning so that I shouldn’t have to pay for strangers. If they wished, I was ready to go for another ride, but the proprietor’s daughter herself said that it was enough; instead, she wanted to go to the sweet tent. In my stupidity and curiosity I led the way to the wheel of fortune. As far as it was possible, they were very sparing of my money. Then off for the sweets. The tent had a large stock, and was as clean and neat as a store on the main street of a city. At the same time the prices were low, just as they are at our fairs. Then we went back to the dance floor. In all this I was more sensible of the girls than of my own bounty. Now they were ready for soda again, and thanked me prettily, the oldest for all of them and each for herself. When the dance began we had to leave, it was already a quarter to ten.