Franz Kafka, one of the greatest Jewish writers of the 20th century, died 100 years ago this week, at the age of 40. To mark this centenary, the Weston Library, part of Oxford’s famous Bodleian Library, is showing an extraordinary exhibition of his literary notebooks, drawings, diaries, letters and postcards, including the original manuscripts of two of Kafka’s three novels, The Castle and Amerika, and pages from his most famous short stories, including Metamorphosis, In the Penal Colony and his breakthrough work, The Judgement. It is the largest exhibition of Kafka’s manuscripts and drawings ever shown.
But Kafka: Making of an Icon doesn’t just celebrate his achievements and creativity, it also shows how he continues to inspire new literary, theatrical and cinematic creations around the world and features works such as Andy Warhol’s 1980 portrait of him from the series Ten Portraits of Jews of the Twentieth Century.
Some of the letters are fascinating. There is one to his long-time employer, an insurance company in Prague, where he claims to be sick after having spent the whole night writing one of his most astonishing short stories, The Judgement. His Hebrew notebook, glossary and his letter (in Hebrew) to his teacher demonstrate his dedication to learning the language that connected him to his family roots. And there is the note to his friend Max Brod in which he famously instructs him to burn all his unpublished manuscripts.
Part of the display is dedicated to what is perhaps Kafka’s best-known work, The Metamorphosis. Alongside the original manuscript of the novella, the exhibition includes entomology book illustrations that explore the possibilities of what the creature that used to be Gregor Samsa might have looked like. Elsewhere, a model of his family’s apartment in Prague shows how similar it was to Samsa’s family home.
The exhibition is accompanied by a superbly illustrated book of essays, Kafka: making of an Icon, edited by emeritus Oxford professor of German Ritchie Robertson. His words open up fascinating new perspectives on Kafka’s life and work, making us look at him very differently. In two of the essays, Robertson looks at the importance of Kafka’s Czech background and his complex Jewish identity. “It may come as a surprise,” he writes, “to learn that Kafka’s contemporaries thought him a distinctly local author with a Prague flavour that even German readers outside Bohemia would miss.” We learn too that Kafka grew up in a city divided between German- and Czech-speakers and that at home his parents spoke German but Czech with their servants.
Life in pictures: (clockwise from left) with Felice Bauer to whom he was engaged twice; as a boy; drawing; with two of his three sisters, all of whom were murdered in the Holocaust; a drawing; as a young man[Missing Credit]
Kafka’s family was not especially religious, but he was deeply interested in many different aspects of Jewishness: the new Zionist movement, Judaism and Yiddish theatre. In the winter of 1911-12, a troupe of actors from Lemberg (then the capital of Galicia) visited Prague to perform plays in Yiddish. Kafka attended some 20 of the performances and the experience introduced him to the very different Jewish culture of eastern Europe, which seemed more alive, part of a living tradition.
In her two essays, Professor Duttlinger shows what a gifted artist Kafka was and how important travel was to him. His drawings of solitary figures are haunting and anticipate some of the great themes of his writing.
Though he spent his life in Prague, he was fascinated by faraway places like China and America and aware of European colonialism, the subject of one of his greatest stories, In the Penal Colony.
Crucially, she points out, he was fascinated by new cultural forms, especially film and photography. The most moving section of the exhibition deals with Kafka’s final illness. In 1917 he started coughing up blood, the first signs of the TB that was to kill him. At the end of his life he was unable to speak and relied on writing notes, one of which is shown here. There is also a manuscript by his last partner Dora Diamant who stayed by his bedside and wrote a note about his last days. The story of how the world’s greatest collection of Kafka’s papers and manuscripts came to be in Oxford is told in a fascinating filmed interview with his niece, Marianna Steiner.
In 1939 she saw Kafka’s close friend and literary executor, Max Brod, board a train leaving Prague just as German soldiers were about to march in. He took Kafka’s manuscripts with him in a single suitcase and safely made it to Tel Aviv, where he spent the rest of his life. He deposited the papers in a bank safe, but during the Suez Crisis of 1956, fearing for their safety, he moved them to a bank vault in Zurich, where they stayed for five years.
Kafkaesque: (from left) at an amusement park; as a child; as a boy[Missing Credit]
Marianna’s son, Michael, was studying in Oxford where he met Malcolm Pasley, Fellow in German at Magdalen College.
Through Michael Steiner, Pasley discovered that Kafka’s manuscripts were not all owned by Brod, as was widely assumed, but some belonged to his surviving heirs. Pasley drove to Zurich, checked the authenticity of the papers, insured them for £100,000, and drove them back to Oxford in his Fiat.
The most famous part of Kafka’s literary work that is not in Oxford is the manuscript of Der Process (The Trial), which Brod considered his personal property, and which after his death was auctioned by Sotheby’s in 1988 and bought (for more than £1 million) by the Deutsches Literaturarchiv (DLA) in Marbach.
One of the curators of the exhibition, Professor Duttlinger, told me that Kafka’s famous letters to Felice Bauer, the most important part of his correspondence, were auctioned off in 1987 and bought by a private collector; they have not been seen since.
When Kafka’s letters to his youngest sister Ottla came up for auction in 2011, it was feared they would meet the same fate.
However, they were saved for academic research by a historic partnership between the DLA and the Bodleian Library, which jointly purchased the letters with the help of private donors.
Kafka: Making of an Icon is not just a great exhibition in its own right. It is testimony to how libraries and archives can now collaborate to build up their collections put together extraordinary exhibitions.
[Missing Credit]
Kafka: Making of an Icon is at the Bodleian Library until October 27
