The Diaries of Kafka: 1910-1923 by Franz Kafka

First published: 1948-1949

Type of work: Journals

Critical Evaluation:

Around the turn of the century and continuing until the years following World War I, a circle of German writers in Prague exerted great influence on German literature. Franz Werfel, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Max Brod were the most widely read authors of this group, but in the closing decades of the period Franz Kafka, sometimes called the author of anxiety, found an ever increasing audience. Biographers of Kafka complain that his short life does not offer anything dramatic to report: his existence could be termed provincial because the major part of his life, except for a short period of travel, was spent within a few city blocks in Prague. His father was a merchant and his mother the daughter of a brewery owner. The family, financially well-to-do, tried to maintain a nineteenth century upper-class living standard: French governess, humanistic education for the children, and efforts to preserve a bourgeois concept of German culture. The sensitive Kafka found no understanding at home; he had almost no communication with his family and the Jewish faith practiced by his parents offered him few consolations. Thus Kafka grew up in a withdrawn isolation, constantly groping for some kind of salvation which he could only find in his writings. He earned a doctor of law degree and worked for fourteen years with an insurance company.

Kafka’s continuous anxiety of being directed by forces over which he had no control and about which he had no knowledge is superbly described in his best-known novel THE TRIAL; however, it is in his diaries that he reveals most about his motivations and his innermost feelings. His friend and fellow writer, Max Brod, has published these diaries with the care of a loving friend, though admitting the omission of a few intimate entries. The diary was compiled out of thirteen notebooks. The first dated entry is May 17, 1910; last notes were written in the summer of 1923. There are also three travel diaries covering Kafka’s travels in Germany, Switzerland, Italy, and France during the years 1911 and 1912. Since these entries are quite different from the usual character of the diary, the travel journals have been separated from the rest.

The diary was a necessity for Kafka, who said that the advantage in keeping one is that it gives awareness of change in thought and feeling. When he realizes that he has neglected his diary, he promises that he will continue to keep it because it is the only place where he can hold on to experience. His urge to write was the safety valve for the hypersensitive and withdrawn Kafka, a means of relieving his anxieties through writing down his deepest feelings so that later he could reverse the process. Literature is his only obsession because, he wrote, literature was the only thing that did not bore him. Whether this fact was only in his mind does not disturb him. He feels that he can only observe family life, not participate in it.

Contemporary historic events are without interest to him. His entry on August 2, 1914, when World War I started, notes that Germany has declared war on Russia and that he went swimming in the afternoon. He is conscious of the direction of his work and states that his fate as a writer will be to record his inner life of dreams; he feels that his life has dwindled and will continue to dwindle, but this record is the only kind of writing that will satisfy him.

The silent stroller along the streets and parks of Prague is a most inquisitive observer of people and events as he ponders on their work, their salaries, what they will be doing tomorrow, how life in their old age will be, their sleeping habits, if he could do their jobs, or how he would like doing another man’s work. In spite of his talent, writing is to him an arduous task, as if he were drawing words out of empty air. Sometimes he worries about his emotional state and the struggle to find adequate words. He feels as though he is his own tombstone, that every word he puts down slaps against the next; he hears the consonants rub heavily against one another and the vowels accompany them as though they were minstrel-show Negroes.

Kafka is his own critic and seldom finds reason to be satisfied. He is sure that his preconceived ideas are dry, flat, and embarrassing to those around him. Worst of all, he feels that his ideas remain incomplete, even when he has put them down exactly as he has conceived them. He accuses himself frequently of failing and laments, while looking at a simple girl’s dress, that he seldom succeeds in creating anything truly beautiful. Besides the lack of understanding shown toward his writing ambitions by his parents, his employment by an insurance firm conflicts with his literary work, and he longs to be freed of the confining office. Only when his illness becomes critical does he leave off seeing people. His earlier works were written in his parents’ home. His constant struggle with noise is shown in a passage telling how he can hear every sound in the house: the front door, the oven door, singing, and house-cleaning.

Kafka knew that he was not capable of married life, but he also hated the life of a bachelor. He feared becoming an old man fighting to retain his dignity while begging for an invitation when the need for companionship was felt, or the dreariness of carrying home his meals, not returning home to a calm spouse. He was three times engaged, twice to the same girl, yet all efforts to find a partner for life failed. His self-examination provides entries which indicate that he was striving to come to terms with his surroundings, to know the whole of the human and animal community, to reduce life to simplified forms and rules: to make his life conform to these rules as quickly as he could so that he could retain favor in the eyes of the whole world. However, his opinions on basic subjects are uncompromising. He said that education is part of an adult conspiracy in dealing with children.

The diaries contain many notations which demonstrate Kafka’s fierce struggles with symptoms of fear, and he states that only devils could account for the misfortunes in men’s lives. There are a great number of story ideas among the entries. Some are well known to Kafka readers. A great many more fragments leave the reader with the regretful realization that this life ended too soon to complete the outpouring of his unique imaginative power. In the words of Albert Camus, everything in Kafka’s work is meaningful.

The travel diary reveals a lesser known side of his talent. Because he was absorbed in recording experiences outside himself, he was able to interject some humorous notes, as in his description of a linguistic encounter during a train ride in Italy. He states that the Italian language when spoken commands one’s attention whether or not what is being said can be understood, even though one who is uncertain of his Italian cannot prevail against the fluent Italian speaker.

Kafka was not afraid of death. Several years before his illness he wrote that he would be content on his deathbed if the pain were not too great; he believed that the best of his writing revealed his serenity and contentment in the face of death. But a death without pain was not destined for Kafka. As his tuberculosis progressed, the entries of the diary reflect his anxiety of losing the strength to keep on writing. The entries become shorter. One of the last entries, written on June 12, 1923, states that his days and nights are filled with pain, almost without interruption.

Kafka died in a sanatorium near Vienna on June 3, 1924. In spite of the many volumes which now have been written about him, it still appears that he defies any clear definition in literary terms. A minority of critics feel that his mastery of the German language is limited because he lived in linguistic isolation and never was part of the contemporary stream of German writing. The German spoken in Prague did not encompass the avant-garde innovations which flourished shortly before and after World War I in Germany and Switzerland. But the strength of Kafka’s style seems to derive from this lack of participation in literary fashions; it left him with simple word choices which expressed even more poignantly the complexities of his imaginary inner world. Whatever the criteria may be, it is undeniable that Kafka is today, in the words of a German critic, a “focal-point author.” One of Kafka’s few friends, Milena Jesenska, wrote that he stood beside mankind and looked at humanity in amazement, that he exposed himself to life like a naked man among the clothed. The nakedness of innocence, of wonder, of the mystery of creation in art, is clearly revealed in his diaries. The document is human because a man of deep sensibility is speaking.