‘The Diaries of Franz Kafka’
By Franz Kafka; translated by Ross Benjamin
Schocken, 704 pages

Franz Kafka, dying of tuberculosis, wanted his manuscripts burned to ash. Instead, they have become something like Moses’s burning bush, showing no signs of being consumed. The latest crackle is a new translation of Kafka’s Tagebücher, or diaries, undertaken by Ross Benjamin. The undertaking discloses that beneath Kafka’s lean and gnomic fictions is a mountain of observation and rumination. Becoming Kafkaesque was a daily grind. 

Mr. Benjamin notes that Kafka “worked on his diary entries with unvarying literary intensity, revising, adding, cutting, correcting.” No casual jottings, they were the embers of a mind on fire. They also have been elusive in English, with the only version released in 1948 by Kafka’s best friend and literary executioner, Max Brod, who freely edited his friend’s intimacies with avuncular authority. This new version works off the less altered German critical edition.

It is illuminating that the Diaries are being brought out by, in Schocken, a distinguished publisher of Judaica. That underscores that Kafka is indisputably a Jewish figure. At one point, he writes “my name in Hebrew is Anschel,” and in 1921, he records seeing a “Palestine film in the afternoon.” He took Hebrew lessons, and mulled aliyah. Whatever else one can say of Kafka, he felt the tug of Zion. He shared this yearning with another diarist: Theodor Herzl.

Kafka kept diaries between 1909 and 1923, the period during which he composed such touchstones as “The Trial,” “A Hunger Artist,” “In the Penal Colony,” and “A Report to the Academy.” Those works have the inevitability of fate about them, not a word out of place. The diaries are more contingent and improvisatory. Mr. Benjamin pledges “fidelity even to Kafka’s outright mistakes” of spelling and syntax. He’s after the “rawness of Kafka’s writing.”

The diaries come down to us in 12 quarto handwritten notebooks and two bundles of travel notes. Kafka’s script is shaky and spidery but legible, each entry bounded by a horizontal line. Some entries are just a few words; “the seamstress in a downpour” or “writers speak stench.” Others are more fulsome, like “The Judgment,” a short story gestated in a diary entry that Kafka wrote “from 10 o’clock in the evening until 6 o’clock in the morning.”

Keep this book by your bedside, and dip in and out of its more than 700 pages to pepper your own day with Kafka’s flavors. One entry reads, “Today burned many old disgusting papers.” Kafka can “despair over my body and over the future with this body,” but also can chart wonder at that same body, observing that his ear “felt fresh rough cool juicy to the touch like a leaf.” He calls the entire diaristic enterprise a “useless, unfinished thing.” 

Kafka — a German-speaking Czech Jew whose sisters would be murdered at the Łódź Ghetto and Auschwitz — writes of his “desire to know Yiddish literature, which apparently is allotted an uninterrupted stance of national struggle that determines every work.” In the Yiddish theater he seeks a “Judaism in which the beginnings of my own would rest and would develop toward me and thereby enlighten me.” He called the language “jargon.”

Kafka shares his intention to “write a Dickens novel.” He admired the novelist’s “richness and unreserved powerful onrush,” but dings him when he “wearily stirs only what he has already achieved into a jumble.” The “senseless whole,” he scribbles, is “barbaric.” He calls “David Copperfield” a “suitcase story.” He studies Goethe’s diary, in awe of that man’s productivity. A girl in a coffeehouse has a “full, laughing, endlessly breathing, face.”

Sometimes, Kafka’s observations are almost cinematic in their delivery of visual detail. At a shop, he observers the “weary movements of the employees all around behind the desks. Weakly tying up a package, unconsciously dusting off some boxes, stacking up used packing paper.” You feel as if you are at Prague, the sun setting on one last errand before returning home. It is closing time, and it feels like Kafka is lingering, not quite ready to go. 

Other reflections are more speculative. Diagnosing himself, he notes that the “penchant for depicting my dreamlike inner life has pushed everything else aside and all this has atrophied in a terrible way and doesn’t cease to atrophy.” He memorably asks, “what do I have in common with Jews? I have scarcely anything in common with myself and should stand completely silent in a corner, content that I can breathe.”  

Kafka quickly became a lodestar and a rabbi for those who could not find it in themselves to believe. Walter Benjamin — obsessed with his near contemporary — thought that his work “represents a sickening of tradition,” and Gershom Scholem told his students that “in order to understand the Kabbalah” they should “read Franz Kafka’s writings first.” This is the Kafka who is seen as the last Jewish prophet, the key to the horror of the last century. 

That is not the Kafka of these diaries, who patters like a daily companion. This Kafka  writes, “I make plans. I stare ahead, lest I move my eyes away from the imaginary peepholes of the imaginary kaleidoscope into which I’m looking. I jumble up good and selfish intentions, the good ones are washed out in the color that instead passes on to the merely selfish ones. I invite heaven and earth to participate in my plans, but I don’t forget the little people.”