The Diaries of Franz Kafka (72 page)

At noon the departure of Frau von W., the Swedish widow who resembles a leather strap. Only a grey jacket over her usual clothes, a little grey hat with a bit of a veil. Her brown face looked very delicate in such a frame; only distance and concealment exercise an effect on regular features. Her luggage consisted of a small knapsack, there was not much more than a nightgown in it. This is the way she always travels, came from Egypt, is going to Munich.

Dance at Stapelburg in the evening. The celebration lasts four days, hardly any work is done. We saw the new champion shot, and on his back read the names of the champions from the beginning of the nineteenth century on. Both dance floors full. Couple stood behind couple around the hall. Each had only a short dance every fifteen minutes. Most of them were silent, not from embarrassment or any other reason, but simply silent. A drunken man was standing at the edge of the dance floor, knew all the girls, lunged for them or at least stretched out his arms to hug them. Their dancing partners didn’t budge. There was a great deal of noise, from the music, and the shouting of the people at the tables down below and those standing at the bar. We walked vainly around for some time (I and Dr Sch.). I was the one who accosted a girl. I had already noticed her outside when she and two friends were eating frankfurters with mustard. She was wearing a white blouse with flowers embroidered over her arms and shoulders. Her head was bent forward in a sweet and melancholy way, so that her breast was squeezed and her blouse puffed out. Her turned-up little nose, in such a posture, added to the melancholy. Patches of reddish brown here and there on her face. I accosted her just as she was descending the two steps from the dance floor. We stood face to face and she turned around. We danced. Her name was Auguste A., she was from Wolfenbüttel and had been employed on the farm of a certain Klaude in Appenroda for a year and a half. My peculiarity of not understanding names even after they have been repeated many times, and then not remembering them. She was an orphan and would enter a convent on 1 October. She hadn’t
told her friends about it yet. She had already intended to enter in April but her employers wouldn’t let her go. She was entering the convent because of the bad experiences she had had. She couldn’t tell me about them. We walked up and down in the moonlight in front of the dance hall, my little erstwhile friends pursued me and my ‘bride’. Despite her melancholy she liked to dance very much, what was especially evident later on when I temporarily gave her over to Dr Sch. She was a farm worker. She had to go home at ten o’clock.

22 July. Miss G., teacher, owl-like, vivacious young face with animated and alert features. Her body is more indolent. Mr Eppe, private-school headmaster from Braunschweig. A man who gets the better of me. His speech is authoritative, impassioned if necessary, considered, musical – even hesitant, for form’s sake. Soft face, a soft beard growing over his cheeks and chin. Mincing walk. I found myself diagonally across from him when he and I sat down together (it was his first time) at the common table. A silently chewing lot of people. He scattered words here and there. If the silence continued unbroken, there wasn’t anything he could do. But if someone down the table said a word, he at once took it up, with no great to-do, however; rather to himself as though he had been the one addressed and was now being listened to, and at the same time looked down at the tomato he was peeling. Everyone paid attention except those who felt shamed and were defiant, like me. He laughed at no one, but when he spoke acknowledged all opinions. If one stirred, then he continued humming softly while he cracked nuts or performed all those little preliminaries which are necessary when eating vegetables and fruit. (The table was covered with bowls and you mixed the foods as you pleased.) Finally he involved everyone in his own affairs on the pretext that he had to make a note of all the foods and send the list to his wife. After he had beguiled us with his wife for several days, he began all over again with some new stories about her. She suffers from melancholia, he said, has to go to a sanatorium in Goslar, will be accepted only if she pledges herself to stay for eight weeks, brings a nurse, etc.; the whole thing, as he had worked it out and as he once more worked it out for us at the table, will cost more than 1,800 marks. But no trace of an intention to excite sympathy. But still, anything as expensive as this needs to be
thought over, everybody thinks things over. A few days later we heard that his wife was coming, perhaps this sanatorium will do for her. During the meal he received the news that his wife had just arrived with her two boys and was waiting for him. He was happy but ate calmly to the end, though there is no end to these meals, for they put all the courses on the table at the same time. His wife is young, fat, with a waist marked only by her clothes, clever blue eyes, high-combed blonde hair, can cook, market, etc., very well. At breakfast – his family hadn’t arrived at the table yet – while cracking nuts, he told Miss G. and me: His wife suffers from melancholia, weak kidneys, her digestion is bad, she suffers from agoraphobia, falls asleep only towards five o’clock in the morning; then if she is awakened at eight ‘she naturally frets herself into a temper’ and becomes ‘furious’. She has a very serious heart disorder, a severe asthma. Her father died in a madhouse.

T
HE
text of the
Diaries
is as complete as it was possible to make it. A few passages, apparently meaningless because of their fragmentary nature, are omitted. In most instances no more than a few words are involved. In several (rare) cases I omitted things that were too intimate, as well as scathing criticism of various people that Kafka certainly never intended for the public. Living persons are usually identified by an initial or initials – that is, when they are not artists or political figures who because of their public activity must always anticipate criticism. Although I have used the blue pencil in the case of attacks on people still alive, I have not considered this sort of censorship necessary in the little that Kafka has to say against myself (partly in lighthearted playful mockery, and partly in earnest). The reader himself will know how to correct the false impression naturally arising out of this, that I was the only person against whom Kafka harboured anything. On this, as on many other points, I have followed the example of V. Chertkov in his editing of Tolstoy’s diaries (cf. Chertkov’s preface to that edition).

One must in general take into consideration the false impression that every diary unintentionally makes. When you keep a diary, you usually put down only what is oppressive or irritating. By being put down on paper painful impressions are got rid of. Pleasant impressions for the most part do not have to be counteracted in this way; you make note of them, as many people should know from experience, only in exceptional cases, or when (as in the case of a travel diary) it is your express purpose to do so. Ordinarily, however, diaries resemble a kind of defective barometric curve that registers only the ‘lows’, the hours of greatest depression, but not the ‘highs’.

This rule also holds true for the thirteen quarto notebooks that constitute Kafka’s true diary. In the ‘Travel Diaries’ of the same period a relatively brighter mood prevails. His good humour is seen with even more distinctness in his letters. A gloom begins to settle on the letters
only as his illness grows worse, though then, to be sure, they are coloured the deepest black of despair. For the most part, however, one can distinguish forms of
personal
utterance (each of his
literary
works, of course, runs the gamut of the scale): the quarto notebooks show up as the darkest band of the spectrum; his travel notes are somewhat brighter; many of the letters (roughly, until the Zürau period, and even into it) are brighter still; in his conversations and daily intercourse there was often – even most often, during the early periods of his life – a gay ingenuousness one would scarcely credit to the author of the
Diaries
.

The bulk of the
Diaries
is contained in thirteen notebooks of quarto size.

The first, third, fourth, and fifth notebooks Kafka numbered himself, in Roman numerals (the second notebook bears no number). Pages are numbered consecutively throughout, although a second pagination, also by Kafka, makes for some confusion. There was a further difficulty in arranging the material chronologically in the fact Kafka would occasionally, in the same notebook, write from the last page backwards as well as from the first page forwards, so that the entries met in the middle. Nevertheless, it was possible to establish the correct chronological order.

The first notebook begins with several undated entries. The first date noted is 17–18 May 1910. A few pages later there are entries for the period from 19 February 1911 to 24 November 1911. Notebook II, embracing the period from 6 November 1910 to May 1911, fills in the interval between May 1910 and February 1911, and also contains part of the first chapter of
Amerika
, ‘The Stoker’. Notebook III goes from 26 October 1911 to 24 November 1911. Thus the first three notebooks dovetail – what is also the case with Notebooks VIII and IX. Notebook IV embraces the period from 28 November 1911 to the end of that year; Notebook V (in which several obviously erroneous dates had to be corrected) goes from 4 January 1912 to 8 April 1912; Notebook VI from 6 May 1912 to September 1912. Notebook VI contains ‘The Judgement’ and the second part of ‘The Stoker’. After an interval the diary is continued in Notebook VII from 2 May 1913 to 14 February
1914, and in Notebook VIII from 16 February 1914 to 15 August 1914. Notebook VIII, however, also contains (beginning on the last page and going backwards) entries for the month of February 1913, and Notebook IX belongs to the period covered by the eighth notebook. Many pages have been torn out of the ninth and tenth notebooks. The latter notebook goes from 21 August 1914 (thus it follows directly after Notebook VIII) to 27 May 1915. Notebook XI contains entries for the period from 13 September 1915 to 30 October 1916, as well as a few from April to August 1917. Notebook XII, many of whose pages likewise were torn out by the author, begin in Zürau on 15 September 1917 and goes to 10 November 1917; after a lengthy interval it resumes with the entry of 27 June 1919, continuing on until 10 January 1920. The last – the thirteenth – notebook embraces the period between 15 October 1921 and November 1922, and also contains a few notes dated 12 June 1923. A part of the incomplete ‘Investigations of a Dog’ (not the beginning, however) is sketched out in it in minuscule characters. In the earlier notebooks (the first eight) Kafka writes a large and swinging hand; later it gradually grows smaller and pointed.

These thirteen notebooks form a stylistic whole that I have tried to preserve. The writer notes down literary ideas, the beginnings of stories, or reflections passing through his head. The principles that guide him; the manner in which he looks to his literary efforts for a counterweight against the unfriendly world around him; the hated, arduous, indeed exhausting job – all this is repeatedly shown in detail in the entries themselves. In addition to the inspiration of his imagination, Kafka notes down occurrences in the workaday world, and also dreams – there are sketches where dreams predominate over relatively ‘realistic’ entries; often they are the starting-point for literary creation. In exceptionally happy cases the result, whether long or short, is a finished literary work in every respect. From these Kafka later chose a few for publication; they are to be found in Vol. I
^*
of the
Gesammelte Schriften
. In the context of the
Diaries
an unexpected light is very often cast on the content of these pieces.

Thus, amid daily notations which served the writer as a kind of springboard for literary creation, one sees many things that could have
been published as independent fragments. One has the half-finished figure and the unworked marble before one at the same time.

These thirteen quarto notebooks thus have a composition different from the ‘blue octavo notebooks’, which are made up almost entirely of literary ideas, fragments, and aphorisms (without reference to the everyday world). The octavo notebooks will be included in a future publication. Notations of a diary nature, dates, are found in them only as a rare exception. The three ‘Travel Diaries’, on the other hand, have an entirely different character again: occurrences and experiences are noted in bare matter-of-fact fashion, in a way that would apparently provide no starting-point for later work – just as a tourist would do. Of course, this tourist is Franz Kafka, and though his manner of observing things seems thoroughly natural, in a mysterious way it departs from everything customary.

Both – the bare factual and the partially wrought (which in happy cases became a finished work) – are uniquely mingled in the thirteen notebooks.

MAX BROD

Tel Aviv, 1948

1.
A member of the Russian Ballet during its guest appearance at the German theatre in Prague.

2.
This remark is connected with the entry of 16 December 1910, concerning Gerhart Hauptmann’s comedy,
Jungfern vom Bischofsberg
.

3.
Kafka was twenty-eight years old at the time.

4.
The story ‘Unhappiness’, from
Meditation
, follows here, without title. This particular draft breaks off several lines before the end. Only a title, ‘The Little Dweller in the Ruins’, follows on a fresh page; this, apparently, is related to the preceding fragments of Kafka’s critique of his education. The fragments that now follow form a mosaic difficult to arrange, since many things are repeated several times. The tale begins over and over again with the same words, and ripples of it are still to be seen in 1911.
  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
.