{"id":162795,"date":"2022-12-22T15:47:01","date_gmt":"2022-12-22T20:47:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=162795"},"modified":"2023-01-03T17:27:07","modified_gmt":"2023-01-03T22:27:07","slug":"kafkas-diaries-1911","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2022\/12\/22\/kafkas-diaries-1911\/","title":{"rendered":"Kafka\u2019s Diaries, 1911"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Facsimile of the first page of the diaries.<\/p><\/div>\n

The following is drawn from Ross Benjamin\u2019s translation of the complete, uncensored diaries of Franz Kafka, to be published by Schocken Books in January 2023. Benjamin sought to preserve the diaries\u2019 distinctive writing, including its rough edges and inconsistencies. This excerpt contains diary entries from late March to late September 1911.\u00a0<\/i><\/p>\n

\n
\n
Between March 19 and 28, 1911, Kafka (1883-1924) attended several lectures given by Rudolf Steiner (1861\u20131925) at the invitation of the Prague chapter of the Theosophical Society. After the end of his lecture series, Steiner remained in Prague for two more days, which were reserved for personal conversations at the Hotel Victoria, where he was staying. The audience that Kafka describes in the following diary entry probably took place on March 29. In the \u201cprepared speech\u201d Kafka presents to Steiner, the twenty-seven-year-old writer seems to be responding to Steiner\u2019s description, in one of the lectures on \u201cOccult Physiology,\u201d of a \u201cmystical immersion in the self, as well as the reverse, the lifting of oneself out of one\u2019s own consciousness.\u201d<\/i><\/div>\n
\u00a0<\/i><\/div>\n
\n

Kafka returned to his diary in August shortly before a trip to Switzerland, northern Italy, and Paris with Max Brod, his fellow writer and intimate friend. He wrote his notes on that trip in a separate travel diary. After parting from Brod, Kafka stayed at the naturopathic\u00a0<\/i>sanatorium Erlenbach near Zurich.\u00a0<\/i>When he returned to Prague, Brod brought him together with the painter, graphic artist, and writer Alfred Kubin (1877\u20131959), probably on September 26, the day of Kafka\u2019s entry recording this encounter.<\/i><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 My visit to Dr. Steiner.
\nA woman is already waiting (upstairs on the 3rd floor of the Viktoria Hotel on Jungmannsstrasse) but implores me to go in before her. We wait. The secretary comes and holds out hope to us. Glancing down a corridor, I see him. A moment later he comes toward us with arms half spread. The woman declares that I was here first. Now I walk behind him as he leads me into his room. His black frock coat, which on lecture evenings appears polished, (not polished, but only shiny due to its pure black) is now in the light of day (3 o\u2019clock in the afternoon) dusty and even stained especially on the back and shoulders. In his room I try to show my humility, which I cannot feel, by looking for a ridiculous place for my hat; I put it on a small wooden stand for lacing boots. Table in the middle, I sit facing the window, he on the left side of the table. On the table some papers with a few drawings, which recall those from the lectures on occult physiology. A magazine Annalen f\u00fcr Naturphilosophie covers a small pile of books, which seem to be lying around elsewhere too. Only you can\u2019t look around, because he keeps trying to hold you with his gaze. But whenever he doesn\u2019t do so, you have to watch out for the return of the gaze. He begins with a few loose sentences: So you\u2019re Dr. Kafka? Have you been interested in theosophy long? But I press forward with my prepared speech: I feel a large part of my being striving toward theosophy, but at the same time I have the utmost fear of it. I\u2019m afraid, namely, that it will bring about a new confusion, which would be very bad for me since my present unhappiness itself consists of nothing but confusion. This confusion lies in the following: My happiness, my abilities and any possibility of being in some way useful have always resided in the literary realm. And here I have, to be sure, experienced states (not many) that are in my opinion very close to the clairvoyant states described by you Herr Doktor, in which I dwelled completely in every idea, but also filled every idea and in which I felt myself not only at my own limits, but at the limits of the human in general. Only the calm of enthusiasm, which is probably peculiar to the clairvoyant, was still missing from those states, even if not entirely. I conclude this from the fact that I have not written the best of my works in those states.\u2014I cannot now devote myself fully to this literary realm, as would be necessary, and indeed for various reasons. Leaving aside my family circumstances, I couldn\u2019t live off literature if for no other reason than the slow emergence of my works and their special character; moreover, my health and my character also hinder me from devoting myself to what is in the most favorable case an uncertain life. I have therefore become an official in a social insurance institute. Now these two professions could never tolerate each other and permit a shared happiness. The least happiness in one becomes a great unhappiness in the other. If I have written something good one evening, I am aflame the next day in the office and can accomplish nothing. This back-and-forth keeps getting worse. In the office I outwardly live up to my duties, but not my inner duties and every unfulfilled inner duty turns into an unhappiness that never leaves me. And to these two never-to-be-balanced endeavors am I now to add theosophy as a third? Won\u2019t it disturb both sides and itself be disturbed by both? Will I, already at present such an unhappy person be able to bring the 3 to a conclusion? I have come Herr Doktor to ask you this, for I sense that, if you consider me capable of it, I could actually take it on.
\nHe listened very attentively, without appearing to observe me at all, completely devoted to my words. He nodded from time to time, which he seems to consider an aid to strong concentration. At first a quiet head cold bothered him, his nose was running, he kept working the handkerchief deep into his nose, one finger at each nostril<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\u2014<\/p>\n

Since in contemporary Western European Jewish stories the reader has grown accustomed to immediately seeking and finding under or over the story the solution to the Jewish question too, but in \u201cJ\u00fcdinnen\u201d such a solution is not shown or even presumed, it is possible that the reader will without further ado recognize in this a deficiency of \u201cJ\u00fcdinnen,\u201d and will look on only reluctantly if Jews are supposed to be walking around in the light of day without political encouragement from past or future. Here he must tell himself that, especially since the rise of Zionism, the possibilities for a solution are so clearly arrayed around the Jewish problem that in the end a turn of the writer\u2019s body is all that\u2019s required to find a particular solution appropriate to the part of the problem under consideration.<\/p>\n

\u2014<\/p>\n

I sensed at the sight of him what pains he had taken for my sake, which now\u2014perhaps only because he was weary\u2014gave him this certainty. Wouldn\u2019t another little exertion have sufficed and the deception would have worked, perhaps worked even now. Did I defend myself, then? I did stand stubbornly here outside the house, but just as stubbornly I hesitated to go up. Was I waiting until the guests would come, singing, to fetch me?<\/p>\n

\u2014<\/p>\n

15 August 1911 \u00a0 \u00a0 The time that has now gone by, in which I haven\u2019t written a word, has been important for me because at the swimming schools in Prague, K\u00f6nigssaal and Czernoschitz I have stopped being ashamed of my body. How late I catch up on my education now at the age of 28, it would be called a delayed start in a race. And perhaps the harm of such a misfortune consists not in the fact that you don\u2019t win; that is actually only the still visible, clear, sound kernel of the misfortune, which goes on to blur and become boundless, driving you, who should run around the circle, into the interior of the circle. Aside from that I have also noticed many other things about myself in this time, which has to a small extent also been happy, and will try to write them down in the next few days.<\/p>\n

\u2014<\/p>\n

20 VIII<\/small> 11
\nI have the unhappy belief that I don\u2019t have time for the slightest good work, for I really don\u2019t have time to spread myself out in all directions for a story, as I would have to. But then I believe again that my trip will turn out better, that I will take things in better, if I\u2019m loosened up by a little writing and so I try again.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

I sensed at the sight of him what pains he had taken for my sake, which now, perhaps only because he was weary, gave him this certainty. Wouldn\u2019t another little exertion have sufficed and the deception would have worked, perhaps worked even now. Did I defend myself, then? I did stand stubbornly here outside the house, but just as stubbornly I hesitated to go up. Was I waiting until the guests came, singing, to fetch me?<\/p>\n

\u2014<\/p>\n

\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0I have been reading about Dickens. Is it so hard and can an outsider comprehend that one experiences a story in oneself from its beginning from the distant point to the approaching locomotive of steel, coal and steam, even now does not abandon it but wants to be chased by it and, having time for this, is chased by it and runs in front of it by one\u2019s own impetus wherever it thrusts and wherever one lures it.<\/p>\n

\u2014<\/p>\n

\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0I can\u2019t understand and can\u2019t even believe it. I live only here and there in a little word, in whose vowel (\u201cthrusts\u201d above), for example, I lose my useless head for a moment. First and last letter are beginning and end of my fishlike feeling.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

24 August 1911
\nSitting with acquaintances outdoors at a coffeehouse table and looking at a woman at the next table who has just arrived, breathes heavily under large breasts and with a heated shiny brownish face sits down. She leans her head back, a heavy down becomes visible, she turns her eyes upward, almost in the way she might sometimes look at her husband, who is now reading an illustrated paper next to her. If only one could persuade her that next to one\u2019s wife in a coffeehouse one is permitted to read at most a newspaper but never a magazine. A moment makes her aware of her corpulence and she moves away from the table a little.<\/p>\n

\u2014<\/p>\n

26 Aug. (1911)<\/em>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 Tomorrow I\u2019m supposed to leave for Italy. This evening my father was so agitated that he couldn\u2019t fall asleep, because he was completely stricken with worry about the shop and with his thereby awakened illness. A wet cloth on his heart, nausea, shortness of breath, sighing while walking back and forth. My mother in her fear finds new consolation. He has always been so energetic, he has always gotten over everything and now\u2014I say that the misery with the shop could last only another \u00bc year, then everything should be all right. He walks up and down sighing and shaking his head. It\u2019s clear that from his point of view his worries are not taken off his shoulders or so much as lightened by us, but even from our point of view they are not, even in our best intentions there\u2019s some conviction, however sad, that he must provide for his family.\u2014Later I thought, he is lying beside my mother, let him press himself against her, close kindred flesh must be soothing.\u2014With his frequent yawning or his incidentally not unappetizing reaching into his nose, my father produces a slight scarcely perceptible reassurance about his condition, although when he is well he in general doesn\u2019t do this. Ottla has confirmed this for me.\u2014My poor mother wants to go to the landlord tomorrow to beg.<\/p>\n

26 Sept. 1911<\/u>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 The artist Kubin recommends Regulin as a laxative, a crushed seaweed that swells in the intestine makes it tremble, thus acts mechanically in contrast to the unhealthy chemical effect of other laxatives, which merely tear through the feces thus leave them clinging to the intestinal walls.\u2014He met Hamsun at Langen\u2019s. He smirks for no reason. During the conversation, without interrupting it, he lifted his foot onto his knee, took a large pair of paper scissors from the table and cut off the fringes of his pants all around. Shabbily dressed with some more valuable detail such as a tie.\u2014Stories of an artists\u2019 boardinghouse in Munich where painters and veterinarians lived (the school for the latter was nearby) and where things were so dissolute that the windows of the house across the street, from where there was a good view were rented out. To satisfy these spectators, a boarder would sometimes jump onto the windowsill and spoon up his soup pot in a monkey posture.\u2014A maker of false antiques who made them look weathered by riddling them with shot and who said of a table: Now we have to drink coffee on it three more times, then it can be sent off to the Innsbruck museum.\u2014Kubin himself: very strong, but somewhat uniform movement of his face, with the same muscle tension he describes the most varied things. Looks different in age, size and strength depending on whether he is sitting, standing up, has on just a suit or an overcoat<\/p>\n

Thurs 27 IX<\/small> 11<\/u>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 Yesterday on Wenzelsplatz encountered 2 girls, kept my eyes too long on one of them, while it was the other who, as became apparent too late, was wearing a wide brown pleated coat as soft as household attire and a little open in front, had a delicate neck and delicate nose. Her hair was in an already forgotten way beautiful.\u2014Old man with loosely hanging pants on the Belvedere. He whistles; when I look at him, he stops; if I look away, he begins again; finally he whistles even when I look at him.\u2014The beautiful large button beautifully attached at the bottom of the sleeve of a girl\u2019s dress. The dress worn beautifully too floating over American boots. How rarely I achieve something beautiful and this unnoticed button and its unknowing dressmaker achieve it.\u2014The storyteller on the way to the Belvedere, whose lively eyes independent of the words she was saying at the moment contentedly surveyed her story to its end\u2014Powerful half turn of the neck of a strong girl,<\/p>\n

29 IX<\/small> 11 \u00a0 \u00a0 Goethe\u2019s diaries: A person who has no diary is in a false position in the face of a diary. When, for example, he reads in Goethe\u2019s diaries \u201c11 I 1797 \u00a0 \u00a0 busy at home all day with various arrangements\u201d it seems to him as if he himself had never done so little in a day.\u2014Goethe\u2019s travel observations different from today\u2019s, because made from a mail coach with the slow changes of the terrain they develop more simply and can be followed much more easily even by someone who doesn\u2019t know those regions. A calm positively scenic thinking sets in. Since the region presents itself unharmed in its native character to the passenger in the carriage and the country roads too cut through the country much more naturally than the railroad tracks, to which they perhaps stand in the same relation as rivers to canals, no violence is required from the viewer either and without great effort he can see systematically. Hence there are few momentary observations, mostly only indoors where certain people immediately surge up boundlessly before one\u2019s eyes, such as Austrian officers in Heidelberg, on the other hand the passage about the men in Wiesenheim is closer to the landscape \u201cthey wear blue coats and white vests adorned with woven flowers\u201d (quoted from memory). Wrote down a lot about the Rhine Falls near Schaffhausen in the middle in larger letters \u201cExcited ideas\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2014<\/p>\n

Cabaret Lucerna. Lucie K\u00f6nig displays photographs with old hairstyles. Worn face. Sometimes she achieves something with her nose thrust high, with her arm upraised and a turn of all her fingers. Flabby face.\u2014Longhen (painter Pittermann) comic facial expressions. A performance that is obviously without enthusiasm and yet cannot be thought so listless, because then it couldn\u2019t be carried out every evening, especially since even when it was invented it was so listless that no satisfactory schema arose that would make the quite frequent appearance of the whole person unnecessary. Pretty clown-jump over a chair into the emptiness of the wings. The whole thing is reminiscent of a presentation in private company where one applauds an arduous insignificant performance with particular vigor out of social necessity, to ensure that the minus of the performance is evenly rounded off by the plus of the applause.\u2014Singer Va\u0161ata. So bad that one loses oneself in the sight of him. But because he is a strong person, he still keeps the audience\u2019s attention halfway concentrated with an animal power undoubtedly perceived only by me.\u2014Gr\u00fcnbaum is effective with the supposedly only apparent hopelessness of his existence.\u2014Odys dancer. Stiff hips. Real fleshlessness. To me red knees suit the dance \u201cFr\u00fchlingsstimmung.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Ross Benjamin\u2019s translations include Friedrich H\u00f6lderlin\u2019s\u00a0<\/em>Hyperion, Joseph Roth\u2019s\u00a0<\/em>Job, and Daniel Kehlmann\u2019s\u00a0<\/em>You Should Have Left\u00a0and\u00a0<\/em>Tyll.\u00a0He was awarded the Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator\u2019s Prize for his rendering of Michael Maar\u2019s\u00a0<\/em>Speak, Nabokov, and he has received a Guggenheim Fellowship for his work on Franz Kafka\u2019s diaries.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cA calm positively scenic thinking sets in.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2312,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[68416],"tags":[1203,7682,67827,52465,11718,3665],"class_list":["post-162795","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-diaries","tag-charles-dickens","tag-diaries","tag-featured","tag-jewish-literature","tag-notebooks","tag-prague"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nKafka\u2019s Diaries, 1911 by Franz Kafka and Ross Benjamin<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"December 22, 2022 \u2013 \u201cA calm positively scenic thinking sets in.\u201d\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2022\/12\/22\/kafkas-diaries-1911\/\" \/>\n<meta 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