Diaries of Franz Kafka 1914 Part 1

Franz Kafka.

Diaries 1914.

2 January. A lot of time well spent with Dr. Weiss.

4 January. We had scooped out a hollow in the sand, where we felt quite comfortable. At night we rolled up together inside the hollow, Father covered it over with trunks of trees, scattering underbrush on top, and we were as well protected as we could be from storms and wild beasts. "Father," we would often call out in fright when it had already grown dark under the tree trunks and Father had still not appeared. But then we would see his feet through a crack, he would slide in beside us, would give each of us a little pat, for it calmed us to feel his hand, and then we would all fall asleep as it were together. In addition to our parents we were five boys and three girls; the hollow was too small for us, but we should have felt afraid if we had not been so close to one another at night.

5 January. Afternoon. Goethe's father was senile when he died. At the time of his father's last illness Goethe was working on Iphigenie.

"Take that woman home, she's drunk," some court official said to Goethe about Christiane (his lover).

August (Goethe's son by Christiane), a drunkard like his mother, vulgarly ran around with common women. Ottilie, whom he did not love but was made to marry by his father for social reasons.

Wolf, the diplomat and writer.

Walter, the musician, couldn't pa.s.s his examinations. Withdrew into the Gartenhaus for months; when the Tsarina wanted to see him: "Tell the Tsarina that I am not a wild animal." "My conscience is more lead than iron."

Wolf's petty, ineffectual literary efforts.

The old people in the garret rooms. Eighty-year-old Ottilie, fifty-year-old Wolf, and their old acquaintances.

Only in such extremes does one become aware of how every person is lost in himself beyond hope of rescue, and one's sole consolation in this is to observe other people and the law governing them and everything. How, outwardly, Wolf can be guided, moved here or there, cheered up, encouraged, induced to work systematically-and how, inwardly, he is held fast and immovable.

Why don't the Tchuktchis (who live in arctic Siberia) simply leave their awful country; considering their present life and wants they would be better off anywhere else. But they cannot; all things possible do happen, only what happens is possible.

A wine cellar had been set up in the small town of F. by a wine dealer from the larger city near by. He had rented a small vaulted cellar in a house on the Ringplatz, painted oriental decorations on the wall, and had put in old plush furniture almost past its usefulness.

6 January. Dilthey: Das Erlebnis und die Dichtung (Experience and Poetry): Love for humanity, the highest respect for all the forms it has taken; stands back quietly in the best post from which he can observe. On Luther's early writings: "the mighty shades, attracted by murder and blood, that step from an invisible world into the visible one" -Pascal.

Letter for A. to his mother-in-law. Liesl kissed the teacher.

8 January. Fantl recited Tete d'or: "He hurls the enemy about like a barrel."

Uncertainty, aridity, peace-all things will resolve themselves into these and pa.s.s away.

What have I in common with Jews? I have hardly anything in common with myself and should stand very quietly in a corner, content that I can breathe.

Description of inexplicable emotions. A.: Since that happened, the sight of women has been painful to me, it is neither s.e.xual excitement nor pure sorrow, it is simply pain. That's the way it was too before I felt sure of Liesl.

12 January. Yesterday: Ottilie's love affairs, the young Englishman-Tolstoy's engagement; I have a clear impression of a young, sensitive, and violent person, restraining himself, full of forebodings. Well dressed, dark, and dark blue.

The girl in the coffeehouse. Her tight skirt, her white, loose, fur-trimmed silk blouse, bare throat, close-fitting gray hat. Her full, laughing, eternally pulsating face; friendly eyes, though a little affected. My face flushes whenever I think of F.

Clear night on the way home; distinctly aware of what in me is mere dull apathy, so far removed from a great clarity expanding without hindrance.

Nikolai Literaturbriefe (Letters on Literature).

There are possibilities for me, certainly, but under what stone do they lie?

Carried forward on the horse- Youth's meaninglessness. Fear of youth, fear of meaninglessness, of the meaningless rise of an inhuman life.

Tellheim: "He has-what only the creations of true poets possess-that spontaneous flexibility of the inner life which, as circ.u.mstances alter, continually surprises us by revealing entirely new facets of itself."

19 January. Anxiety alternating with self-a.s.surance at the office. Otherwise more confident. Great antipathy to "Metamorphosis." Unreadable ending. Imperfect almost to its very marrow. It would have turned out much better if I had not been interrupted at the time by the business trip.

23 January. B., the chief auditor, tells the story of a friend of his, a half-pay colonel who likes to sleep beside an open window: "During the night it is very pleasant; but in the morning, when I have to shovel the snow off the ottoman near the window and then start shaving, it is unpleasant."

Memoirs of Countess Thurheim: "Her gentle nature made her especially fond of Racine. I have often heard her praying G.o.d that He might grant him eternal peace."

There is no doubt that at the great dinners given in his honor at Vienna by the Russian amba.s.sador Count Rasumovsky, he (Suvorov) ate like a glutton the food served upon the table without pausing for a soul. When he was full he would get up and leave the guests to themselves.

To judge by an engraving, a frail, determined, pedantic old man.

"It wasn't your fate," my mother's lame consolation. The bad part of it is, that at the moment it is almost all the consolation that I need. There is my weak point and will remain my weak point; otherwise the regular, hardly varying, semi-active life I have led these last days (worked at the office on a description of our bureau's activities; A.'s worries about his bride; Ottla's Zionism; the girls' enjoyment of the Salten-Schildkraut lecture; reading the memoirs of Thurheim; letters to Weiss and Lowy; proof-reading "Metamorphosis") has really pulled me together and instilled some resolution and hope in me.

24 January. Napoleonic era: the festivities came hard upon each other, everyone was in a hurry "to taste to the full the joys of thc brief interlude of peace." "On the other hand, the women exercised an influence as if in pa.s.sing, they had really no time to lose. In those days love expressed itself in an intensified enthusiasm and a greater abandonment." "In our time there is no longer any excuse for pa.s.sing an empty hour."

Incapable of writing a few lines to Miss Bl. (Grete Bloch), two letters already remain unanswered, today the third came. I grasp nothing correctly and at the same time I feel quite hale, though hollow. Recently, when I got out of the elevator at my usual hour, it occurred to me that my life, whose days more and more repeat themselves down to the smallest detail, resembles that punishment in which each pupil must according to his offense write down the same meaningless (in repet.i.tion, at least) sentence ten times, a hundred times or even oftener; except that in my case the punishment is given me with only this limitation: "as many times as you can stand it."

A. cannot calm himself. In spite of the confidence he has in me and in spite of the fact that he wants my advice, I always learn the worst details only incidentally in the course of the conversation, whereupon I have always to suppress my sudden astonishment as much as I can-not without a feeling that my indifference in face of the dreadful news either must strike him as coldness, or on the contrary must greatly console him. And in fact so I mean it. I learn the story of the kiss in the following stages, some of them weeks apart: A teacher kissed her; she was in his room; he kissed her several times; she went to his room regularly because she was doing some needlework for A.'s mother and the teacher had a good lamp; she let herself be kissed without resistance; he had already made her a declaration of his love; she still goes for walks with him in spite of everything, wanted to give him a Christmas present; once she wrote, Something unpleasant has happened to me but nothing came of it.

A. questioned her in the following way: How did it happen? I want to know all the details. Did he only kiss you? How often? Where? Didn't he lie on you? Did he touch you? Did he want to take off your clothes?

Answer: I was sitting on the sofa with my sewing, he on the other side of the table. Then he came over, sat down beside me, and kissed me; I moved away from him towards the arm of the sofa and was pressed down with my head against the arm. Except for the kiss, nothing happened.

During the questioning she once said: "What are you thinking of? I am a virgin."

Now that I think of it, my letter to Dr. Weiss was written in such a way that it could all be shown to F. Suppose he did that today and for that reason put off his answer?

26 January. Unable to read Thurheim, though she has been my delight these past few days. Letter to Miss Bl. now sent on its way. How it has hold of me and presses against my brow. Father and Mother playing cards at the same table.

The parents and their grown children, a son and a daughter, were seated at table Sunday noon. The mother had just stood up and was dipping the ladle into the round-bellied tureen to serve the soup, when suddenly the whole table lifted up, the tablecloth fluttered, the hands lying on the table slid off, the soup with its tumbling bacon b.a.l.l.s spilled into the father's lap.

The way I almost insulted my mother just now because she had lent Elli Die bose Unschuld (Evil Innocence), which I had myself intended to offer her only yesterday. "Leave me my books! I have nothing else." Speeches of this kind in a real rage.

The death of Thurheim's father: "The doctors who came in soon thereafter found his pulse very weak and gave the invalid only a few more hours to live. My G.o.d, it was my father they were speaking of! A few hours only, and then dead."

28 January. Lecture on the miracles of Lourdes. Free-thinking doctor; bares his strong and energetic teeth, takes great delight in rolling his words. "It is time that German thoroughness and probity stand up to Latin charlatanism." Newsboys of the Messager de Lourdes: "Superbe guerison de ce soir!" "Guerison affirmee!"

(Superb cure this evening! Proven cure!)-Discussion: "I am a simple postal official, nothing more." "Hotel de l'Univers."- Infinite sadness as I left, thinking of F.

Am gradually calmed by my reflections.

Sent letter and Weiss's Galeere (Galley) to Bl.

Quite some time ago A.'s sister was told by a fortune-teller that her eldest brother was engaged and that his fiancee was deceiving him. At that time he rejected all such stories in a rage. I: "Why only at that time? It is as false today as it was then. She hasn't deceived you, has she?" He: "It's true that she hasn't, isn't it?"

2 February. A.: A girl friend's lewd letter to his fiancee. "If we were to take everything as seriously as when we were under the domination of the confessional sermons." "Why were you so backward in Prague, better to have one's fling on a small scale than a large." I interpret the letter according to my own opinion, in favor of his fiancee, with several good arguments occurring to me.

Yesterday A. was in Schluckenau. Sat in the room with her all day holding the bundle of letters (his only baggage) in his hand and didn't stop questioning her. Learned nothing new; an hour before leaving he asked her: "Was the light out during the kissing?" and learned the news, which makes him inconsolable, that the second time W.

kissed her he switched off the light. W. sat sketching on one side of the table, L. sat on the other (in W.'s room, at 11 p.m.) and read Asmus Semper aloud. Then W.

got up, went to the chest to get something (a compa.s.s, L. thinks, A. thinks a contraceptive), then suddenly switched off the light, overwhelmed her with kisses; she sank down on the sofa, he held her arms, her shoulders, and kept saying, "Kiss me!"

L. on another occasion: "W. is very clumsy." Another time: "I didn't kiss him." Another time: "I felt as if I were lying in your arms."

A.: "I must find out the truth, mustn't I?" (he is thinking of having her examined by a doctor). "Only suppose I learn on the wedding night that she has been lying.

Perhaps she's so calm only because he used a contraceptive."

Lourdes: Attack on faith in miracles, also attack on the church. With equal justification he could argue against the churches, processions, confessions, the unhygienic practices everywhere, since it can't be proved that prayer does any good. Karlsbad is a greater swindle than Lourdes; Lourdes has the advantage that people go there out of deepest conviction. What about the crackpot notions people have concerning operations, serum therapy, vaccination, medicines?

On the other hand: The huge hospitals for the pilgrimaging invalids; the filthy piscinas; the brancards waiting for the special trains; the medical commission; the great incandescent crosses on the mountains; the Pope receives three million a year. The priest with the monstrance pa.s.ses by, a woman screams from her stretcher, "I am cured!" Her tuberculosis of the bone continues unchanged.

The door opened a crack. A revolver appeared and an outstretched arm.

Thurheim, II, 35, 28, 37: nothing sweeter than love, nothing pleasanter than flirtation; 45, 48: Jews.

10 February. Eleven o'clock, after a walk. Fresher than usual. Why?1. Max said I was calm.2. Felix is going to be married (was angry with him).3. I remain alone, unless F. will still have me after all.4. Mrs. X.'s invitation; I think how I shall introduce myself to her.

By chance I walked in the direction opposite to my usual one, that is, Kettensteg, Hradcany, Karlsbrucke. Ordinarily I nearly collapse on this road; today, coming from the opposite direction, I felt somewhat lifted up.

11 February. Hastily read through Dilthey's Goethe; tumultuous impression, carries one along, why couldn't one set oneself afire and be destroyed in the flames? Or obey, even if one hears no command? Or sit on a chair in the middle of one's empty room and look at the floor? Or shout "Forward!" in a mountain defile and hear answering shouts and see people emerge from all the bypaths in the cliffs.

13 February. Yesterday at Mrs. X.'s. Calm and energetic, an energy that is perfect, triumphant, penetrating, that finds its way into everything with eyes, hands, and feet. Her frankness, a frank gaze. I keep remembering the ugly, huge, ceremonious Renaissance hats with ostrich feathers that she used to wear; she repelled me so long as I didn't know her personally. How her m.u.f.f, when she hurries towards the point of her story, is pressed against her body and yet twitches. Her children, A. and B.

Reminds one a good deal of W. in her looks, in her self-forgetfulness in the story, in her complete absorption, in her small, lively body, even in her hard, hollow voice, in her talk of fine clothes and hats at the same time that she herself wears nothing of the sort.

View from the window of the river. At many points in the conversation, in spite of the fact that she never allows it to flag, my complete failure, vacant gaze, incomprehension of what she is saying; I mechanically drop the silliest remarks at the same time that I am forced to see how closely she attends to them; I stupidly pet her little child.

Dreams: In Berlin, through the streets to her house, calm and happy in the knowledge that, though I haven't arrived at her house yet, a slight possibility of doing so exists; I shall certainly arrive there. I see the streets, on a white house a sign, something like "The Splendors of the North" (saw it in the paper yesterday); in my dream "Berlin W" has been added to it. Ask the way of an affable, red-nosed old policeman who in this instance is stuffed into a sort of butler's livery. Am givers excessively detailed directions, he even points out the railing of a small park in the distance which I must keep hold of for safety's sake when I go past. Then advice about the tram-car, the U-Bahn, etc. I can't follow him any longer and ask in a fright, knowing full well that I am underestimating the distance: "That's about half an hour away?" But the old man answers, "I can make it in six minutes." What joy! Some man, a shadow, a companion, is always at my side, I don't know who it is. Really have no time to turn around, to turn sideways.

Live in Berlin in some pension or other apparently filled with young Polish Jews; very small rooms. I spill a bottle of water. One of them is tapping incessantly on a small typewriter, barely turns his head when he is asked for something. Impossible to lay hands on a map of Berlin. In the hand of one of them I continually notice a book that looks like a map. But it always proves to be something entirely different, a list of the Berlin schools, tax statistics, or something of the sort. I don't want to believe it, but, smiling, they prove it to me beyond any doubt.

14 February. There will certainly be no one to blame if I should kill myself, even if the immediate cause should for instance appear to be F.'s behavior. Once, half asleep, I pictured the scene that would ensue if, in antic.i.p.ation of the end, the letter of farewell in my pocket, I should come to her house, should be rejected as a suitor, lay the letter on the table, go to the balcony, break away from all those who run up to hold me back, and, forcing one hand after another to let go its grip, jump over the ledge. The letter, however, would say that I was jumping off because of F., but that even if my proposal had been accepted nothing essential would have been changed for me. My place is down below, I can find no other solution, F. simply happens to be the one through whom my fate is made manifest; I can't live without her and must jump, yet-and this F. suspects-I couldn't live with her either. Why not use tonight for the purpose, I can already see before me the people talking at the parents'

gathering this evening, talking of life and the conditions that have to be created for it-but I cling to abstractions, I live completely entangled in life, I won't do it, I am cold, am sad that a shirt collar is pinching my neck, am d.a.m.ned, gasp for breath in the mist.

15 February. How long this Sat.u.r.day and Sunday seem in retrospect. Yesterday afternoon I had my hair cut, then wrote the letter to Bl., then was over at Max's new place for a moment, then the parents' gathering, sat next to L.W., then Baum (met Kr. in the tram), then on the way home Max's complaints about my silence, then my longing for suicide, then my sister returned from the parents' gathering unable to report the least thing. In bed until ten, sleepless, sorrow after sorrow. No letter, not here, not in the office, mailed a letter to Bl. at the Franz-Josef station, saw G. in the afternoon, walked along the Moldau, read aloud at his house; his queer mother who ate sandwiches and played solitaire; walked around alone for two hours; decided to leave Berlin Friday, met Kohl, at home with my brothers-in-law and sisters, then the discussion of his engagement at Weltsch's (J. K.'s putting out the candles), then at home attempted by my silence to elicit aid and sympathy from my mother; now my sister tells me about her meeting, the clock strikes a quarter to twelve.

At Weltsch's, in order to comfort his mother who was upset, I said: "I too am losing Felix by this marriage. A friend who is married is none." Felix said nothing, naturally couldn't say anything, but he didn't even want to.

The notebook begins with F., who on 2 May 1913 made me feel uncertain; this same beginning can serve as conclusion too, if in place of "uncertain" I use a worse word.

16 February. Wasted day. My only joy was the hope that last night has given me of sleeping better.

I was going home in my usual fashion in the evening after work, when, as though I had been watched for, they excitedly waved to me from all three windows of the Genzmer house to come up.

22 February. In spite of my drowsy head, whose upper left side is near aching with restlessness, perhaps I am still able quietly to build up some greater whole wherein I might forget everything and be conscious only of the good in one.

Director at his table. Servant brings in a card.DIRECTOR: Witte again, this is a nuisance, the man is a nuisance.

23 February. I am on my way. Letter from Musil. Pleases me and depresses me, for I have nothing.

A young man on a beautiful horse rides out of the gate of a villa.

8 March. A prince can wed the Sleeping Beauty, or someone even harder to win too, but the Sleeping Beauty can be no prince.

It happened that when Grandmother died only the nurse was with her. She said that just before Grandmother died she lifted herself up a little from the pillow so that she seemed to be looking for someone, and then peacefully lay back again and died.

There is no doubt that I am hemmed in all around, though by something that has certainly not yet fixed itself in my flesh, that I occasionally feel slackening, and that could be burst asunder. There are two remedies, marriage or Berlin; the second is surer, the first more immediately attractive. I dived down and soon everything felt fine. A small shoal floated by in an upwards-mounting chain and disappeared in the green. Bells borne back and forth by the drifting of the tide-wrong.

9 March. Rense walked a few steps down the dim pa.s.sageway, opened the little papered door of the dining-room, and said to the noisy company, almost without regarding them: "Please be a little more quiet. I have a guest. Have some consideration."

As he was returning to his room and heard the noise continuing unabated, he halted a moment, was on the verge of going back again, but thought better of it and returned to his room.

A boy of eighteen was standing at the window, looking down into the yard. "It is quieter now," he said when Rense entered, and lifted his long nose and deep-set eyes to him.

"It isn't quieter at all," said Rense, taking a swallow from the bottle of beer standing on the table. "It's impossible ever to have any quiet here. You'll have to get used to that, boy."

I am too tired, I must try to rest and sleep, otherwise I am lost in every respect. What an effort to keep alive! Erecting a monument does not require the expenditure of so much strength.

The general argument: I am completely lost in F.

Rense, a student, sat studying in his small back room. The maid came in and announced that a young man wished to speak to him. "What is his name?" Rense asked.

The maid did not know.

I shall never forget F. in this place, therefore shan't marry. Is that definite?

Yes, that much I can judge of: I am almost thirty-one years old, have known F. for almost two years, must therefore have some perspective by now. Besides, my way of life here is such that I can't forget, even if F. didn't have such significance for me. The uniformity, regularity, comfort, and dependence of my way of life keep me unresistingly fixed wherever I happen to be. Moreover, I have a more than ordinary inclination toward a comfortable and dependent life, and so even strengthen everything that is pernicious to me. Finally, I am getting older, any change becomes more and more difficult. But in all this I foresee a great misfortune for myself, one without end and without hope; I should be dragging through the years up the ladder of my job, growing ever sadder and more alone as long as I could endure it at all.

But you wanted that sort of life for yourself, didn't you?

An official's life could benefit me if I were married. It would in every way be a support to me against society, against my wife, against writing, without demanding too many sacrifices, and without on the other hand degenerating into indolence and dependence, for as a married man I should not have to fear that. But I cannot live out such a life as a bachelor.

But you could have married, couldn't you?

I couldn't marry then; everything in me revolted against it, much as I always loved F. It was chiefly concern over my literary work that prevented me, for I thought marriage would jeopardize it. I may have been right, but in any case it is destroyed by my present bachelor's life. I have written nothing for a year, nor shall I be able to write anything in the future; in my head there is and remains the one single thought, and I am devoured by it. I wasn't able to consider it all at the time. Moreover, as a result of my dependence, which is at least encouraged by this way of life, I approach everything hesitantly and complete nothing at the first stroke. That was what happened here too.

Why do you give up all hope eventually of having F.?