Franz Kafka: the drawings book review: A milestone in Kafka studies

Until recently only a few of Kafka’s drawings were widely known. Then in 2019, after an extraordinary ten-year-long trial in Israel, hundreds of drawings by Kafka, along with letters and manuscripts, that had been in private ownership for years, were handed over to the National Library of Israel, a story Benjamin Balint comprehensively details in his fascinating account, Kafka’s Last Trial.

This superb book is the first to publish all of Kafka’s drawings, almost 250 of them, including all the newly discovered sketches. It represents, writes the editor, Andreas Kilcher, “the last great unknown trove of Kafka’s works.” It is a milestone in Kafka studies.

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A figure out of a sketch book

Kafka’s drawings cover his whole career, but many date from his university years when he was studying in Prague, in the early 1900s. It was during this time that he met his great friend, and later his literary executor, Max Brod, who saved these drawings. “I rescued them from the waste basket,” Brod wrote in 1948. “Indeed, I cut a number of them from the margins of the course notes from his legal studies.”

In his introduction Kilcher tells the complicated history of Kafka’s drawings, how they ended up with Brod, who took them to safety in Palestine when he fled from Prague in 1939, how he later placed them in four safe deposit boxes in a bank in Zurich, allowing just a few to be published during the 1950s and ‘60s, and then left his entire estate and papers to Ilse Esther Hoffe, who in his words was much “more” than just “my secretary”, and who “kept the drawings fully under wraps”.

The drawings themselves, presented chronologically, consist of three groups. First, those from Kafka’s university years. These are not connected to any texts. The second, much smaller group includes drawings created as part of Kafka’s letters, diaries and notebooks between 1909 and his death in 1924. The third group “consists of ornamental figures that have their origins in the writing process”.

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Portrait of Julie Kafka, Franz's mother