Surprised Kafka’s porn stash took so long to emerge.
A stash of explicit pornography to which Franz Kafka subscribed has emerged for the first time after being studiously ignored by scholars anxious to preserve the iconic writer’s saintly image.
Having stumbled by chance across copies in the British Library in London and the Bodleian in Oxford while doing unrelated research, James Hawes, the academic and Kafka expert, reveals some of this erotic material in Excavating Kafka, to be published this month. His book seeks to explode important myths surrounding the literary icon, a “quasi-saintly” image which hardly fits with the dark and shocking pictures contained in these banned journals.
Their additional significance is that the publisher, Dr Franz Blei, was also the man who first published Kafka in 1908 – a series of miniature stories later gathered in his book Meditation.
[From Franz Kafka’s porn brought out of the closet – Times Online ]
[Raindrop Porn will have to suffice unless I find any graphic goodies on the internet]
and the stash, kept locked with a key only Kafka had, was apparently pretty racy
Even today, the pornography would be “on the top shelf”, Dr Hawes said, noting that his American publisher did not want him to publish it at first. “These are not naughty postcards from the beach. They are undoubtedly porn, pure and simple. Some of it is quite dark, with animals committing fellatio and girl-on-girl action… It’s quite unpleasant.”
“Academics have pretended it did not exist,” Dr Hawes said. “The Kafka industry doesn’t want to know such things about its idol.”
He added: “Perhaps Kafka’s biographers simply don’t like the idea that their literary idol was helped out in this… way in the vital early stages of his career
As far as I can tell, the book is only available in England at the moment. American Puritanism at work.
“Excavating Kafka” (James Hawes)
a different title by James Hawes is available in the US, maybe covering some of the same topics:
“Why You Should Read Kafka Before You Waste Your Life” (James Hawes)
Everybody knows the face of Franz Kafka, whether they have read any of his works or not. And that brooding face carries instant images: bleak and threatening visions of an inescapable bureaucracy, nightmarish transformations, uncanny predictions of the Holocaust. But while Kafka’s genius is beyond question, the image of a mysterious, sickly, shadowy figure who was scarcely known in his own lifetime bears no resemblance to the historical reality. Franz Kafka was a popular and well-connected millionaire’s son who enjoyed good-time girls, brothels, and expensive porn, who landed a highly desirable state job that pulled in at least $90,000 a year in today’s dollars for a six-hour day, who remained a loyal member of Prague’s German-speaking Imperial elite right to the end, and whose work was backed by a powerful literary clique.
Here are some of the prevalent Kafka myths:
*Kafka was the archetypal genius neglected in his lifetime.
*Kafka was lonely.
*Kafka was stuck in a dead-end job, struggling to find time to write.
*Kafka was tormented by fear of sex.
*Kafka was unbendingly honest about himself to the women in his life – too honest.
*Kafka had a terrible, domineering father who had no understanding of his son’s needs.
*Kafka’s style is mysterious and opaque.
*Kafka takes us into bizarre worlds.
James Hawes wants to tear down the critical walls which generations of gatekeepers—scholars, biographers, and tourist guides—have built up around Franz Kafka, giving us back the real man and the real significance of his splendid works. And he’ll take no prisoners in the process.