Kafka Was Totally Into Porn

Everything you know about Kafka the man is wrong.

"The real Kafka was not quite so chaste, however. Describing passing a bordello ‘like a lover passing his sweetheart’s house’, Kafka was far from an infrequent visitor to Prague’s brothels. On 19 August 1908, he wrote of his latest sexual transaction that she was ‘too old to still be melancholy, although she was hurt, if not surprised, that one is not so nice [lieb] to a whore as to a girl in an affair. Since she didn’t console me, I didn’t console her.’

Then there’s the grot mags, or, rather, prepaid subscription-only journals The Amethyst, and it’s post-ban incarnation Opals. Alongside pieces of fin-de-siecle erotica it featured pictures of anything from amphibians performing fellatio to lewd Lautrec-lite.

All of this is interesting, not so much in itself but insofar as legions of Kafka scholars, while poring over the minutiae of Kafka’s daily routine, have simultaneously erased Kafka’s porno stash and brothel-bothering from history. ‘[T]he gatekeepers of the facts don’t want the reader to know about the real Franz Kafka, warts, porn, whores and all’, concludes Hawes.

And so it goes on. For each myth, Hawes responds with fact (and no little wit). The Kafka that emerges is far from the ‘lonely seer of Prague’. He is wealthy, well-connected, and, during his twenties at least, very much enjoying life ‘warts, porn, whores and all’. Not only that, he is far from an unsuccessful writer, having been published and, more intriguingly, half-winning a prestigious German literary prize thanks to the backstage manoeuvrings of his friends."

An interesting aspect of literature, especially when literature is taught, is the remolding of the author to suit the current political climes. Shakespeare is the classic example of this, his biography vague enough that you can paint any picture you want on his blank canvas.

Also raises an interesting contradiction of loving the art but hating the artist. For me most literature starts and ends with Hemingway, who was, by all accounts, a terrible human being. F. Scott Fitzgerald was a unrepentant drunk who sent his wife to the nut house - but he wrote The Great Gatsby.