2023-12-29 19:02:26
Franz Kafka died on June 3, 1924, at the age of less than 41. In July 1923, shortly after his 40th birthday, the writer fell in love again, with Dora Diamant, whom he had met in the Baltic Sea resort of Graal-Müritz near Rostock. In 1922, at just 39, he was temporarily retired from his day job as a Prague insurance clerk. His illness, which was not cured despite treatment, was called tuberculosis.
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“You have to live differently,” Kafka wrote to a friend in Prague after his vacation on the Baltic Sea – and decided this primarily for himself. For the first time in his life he moved away from Prague and took a room in Berlin in September 1923. Steglitz. A few days later, Dora Diamant moved in with him; It was the only time that he lived with a woman – and yet this last love remained “an unknown quantity in Kafka’s life” for a long time; “its significance was often underestimated,” writes Dieter Lamping in his current one Book about Franz Kafka and Dora Diamant.
The Mainz Professor Emeritus of General and Comparative Literature explains why: Unlike Kafka’s relationships with Felice Bauer and Milena Jesenská, there is almost no correspondence from his relationship with Dora Diamant. You don’t write letters to a woman you live with.
It was only thanks to the Kafka biographer Reiner Stach and the novel biography by Kathi Diamant (who, as the namesake, began researching Dora Diamant) that was published in 2013, that we know what we know today, says Lamping. Dora Diamant was 25 when she met Kafka; She had been raised religiously and came from Polish Eastern Jewry, in which Kafka was particularly interested for a while. On the Baltic Sea – in coincidence with Kafka’s guesthouse – she looked after a holiday camp for the Zionist movement; she spoke Polish, Yiddish, Hebrew and German.
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In Berlin, Kafka rented a total of three apartments between September 1923 and March 1924, two in Steglitz and one in Zehlendorf. What sounds like a middle-class Southwest today was, 100 years ago, primarily a cost trap. Initially, the rental prices were influenced by the hyperinflation that ran rampant until mid-November: “The room was rented for me at the end of August for 4 million a month and today it costs around ½ trillion,” reported Kafka, who, as a Czech, was a popular tenant because of his foreign currency The first landlady’s financial demands became increasingly bold after she found out about Kafka’s pension of 1,000 crowns.
The writer and his lover lived modestly, far from Berlin proper. They only went into town a few times at all. Instead of going out, he read to her ETA Hoffmann’s “Kater Murr”, Hebel’s “Schatzkästlein” and Kleist’s “Marquise von O.”, the story with the famous dash that suggests rape. Kafka was often just sick, “on many days he didn’t seem to have gotten up at all,” sums up the biographer Lamping, who cites numerous sources, including Kafka’s friend Max Brod, who saw his friend “in a good mood” and yet noted: “However, his physical condition had worsened.”
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Brod watched Dora and Franz, the two lovers, closely: “They often joked with each other like children. So I remember them dipping their hands together in the same sink and calling it ‘our family bathroom.'” For all the exploitation of private details, as demonstrated here, Lamping’s mosaic of letter, diary and biographical evidence is not uncritical . He lists well-known guests who are said to have visited Kafka during his time in Berlin: among them Willy Haas, Egon Erwin Kisch and Franz Werfel – like Kafka himself, all from Prague – but also raises questions when visitors like Werfel only have one source are documented.
Towards the end of 1923, Kafka’s health began to deteriorate. At the beginning of 1924 he wrote to his parents: “I was very happy about your big New Year’s Eve celebration (I miss my uncle among those present) and the dance; I also took part in New Year’s Eve, even if only from bed. Even though I only live between gardens, the city of Steglitz is quite far away and Berlin even more so, the noise was monstrous for hours with the window open, regardless of the frost, the sky full of rockets, music and shouting all around.
The end of the Berlin period
Kafka, who suffered from tuberculosis, had no aversion to hours of noise and fine dust before midnight – today the enemy of all those who would like to see fireworks completely banned from cities. In his letters to his parents, he deliberately concealed the fact that his apartment was constantly cold rather than ever easily heated. In any case, the heating was soon as expensive as the basic rent.
At the beginning of February 1924, Kafka and Dora Diamant moved to Zehlendorf. “The new apartment seems to be proving its worth,” Kafka wrote to his parents in reassuring language, while in reality he was increasingly feverish. His uncle Dr. Löwy visited Kafka on February 19, 1924 and strongly advised him to go to a sanatorium. On March 17, Kafka took the train to Prague at Anhalter Bahnhof. “The family,” summarizes Lamping, “had regained power over his life,” and the Berlin adventure alongside Dora Diamant was over after less than six months.
In terms of literature, Kafka’s time in Berlin was particularly productive in the form of an unfinished story: it was posthumously given the title “The Burrow” by Brod and is about an animal that creates a system of underground passages to protect itself, “always in fear of its enemy, whom it has identified in its vicinity without having already met him,” says literary scholar Lamping. Kafka’s story “A Little Woman” (contained in the volume of short stories “A Hunger Artist”), published during his lifetime, is read as a portrait of his first Steglitz landlady.
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Dora Diamant followed Franz Kafka to Austria on April 5th, where the writer – now suffering from symptoms of laryngeal tuberculosis – moved into the Kierling sanatorium near Klosterneuburg. It will be his last stop in life. Kafka even proposed marriage to Diamant here.
You can read about why there was no more wedding – and why Dora Diamant later came out to a Kafka fan in 1925 with the words: “Strictly speaking, I am Franz Kafka’s wife” in Dieter Lamping. He has written a sensitive, humanely touching book. Whoever has the gold standard of Kafka biography, namely the four-volume Reiner Stach (including the later volume “Kafka from day to day”) is not at hand, you can confidently get started with Lamping and be perfectly prepared for the Kafka year 2024.
Dieter Lamping: To live differently. Franz Kafka and Dora Diamant. Ebersbach & Simon, 142 pages, 20 euros
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