![]() ![]() “He found it impossible to describe it from his point of view, as a subjective experience. “He is always describing sex as a kind of self-alienation, as if you could lose yourself in sexual encounters,” Stach says. On Kafka’s manuscript for the novel, published posthumously in 1926, it is visible that Kafka originally wrote in the first person until he reached the first sex scene – at which point he changed it to be in the third person. The research brings new life to Kafka’s The Castle, Stach says. But you can’t conclude that he was any one of those things himself.” So, he had homosexual, bisexual, sadistic, masochistic and voyeuristic fantasies and all of these appeared in his works, which is typical for writers like Kafka. He had a really intense access to his own subconscious, more than we might have, and this is why he is such a great writer. Kafka had homosexual fantasies, but everyone does. Stach is not sure why the terms asexual and homosexual have so frequently been applied to an author who had such well-documented affairs with women. Stach, who also read newspaper reports and memoirs of Kafka’s classmates and contemporaries to build a new portrait of the author, writes in the latest volume of the biography that Kafka was “unable to integrate his own sexuality into his self-image because he regarded it as something both physically and ethically impure, and therefore incapable of developing human intimacy with women who actively drew him into this filth – this anti-sensual and misogynist syndrome was shared by millions of middle-class men, whose upbringing simply did not allow for erotic happiness.” So when they met for the first time, often in their early 20s, this was often very embarrassing and very frightening.” “But look at the historical and psychological context – men and women were really separated at the time … they were educated in completely different ways. It is not about morality or religion - just medical risks,” Stach says. They are just focused on risks, never about sexuality as a source of happiness. “I read a lot of books on sexuality published in the 1900s, books usually intended for young girls and men. Photograph: Imagno/Getty Imagesīut, Stach says, this was “absolutely normal” for the bourgeois in early 20th-century Bohemia, where people were more interested in maintaining sexual hygiene than chasing sexual pleasure. ‘When you read his diaries, there is nothing but fear’ … Max Brod, photographed circa 1940. I think Brod was just able to repress all of this in the couple of hours he spent with his lovers, and Kafka was not able to because his mind never slept.” “It is an outdated idea that Kafka was neurotic and Brod was healthy. It almost overwhelmed all his other interests,” Stach says. ![]() ![]() He’d often talk about his ideal woman, the idea of women being the saviour of men – but when you read his diaries, there is nothing but fear: fear of unwanted pregnancies, syphilis, venereal diseases, on every page. In these hitherto unpublished diaries, Stach discovered a new side to the man often credited as being more rambunctious and sexually active than his friend Kafka: Brod himself was constantly and deeply worried about the consequences of sex. While researching for his third volume, titled Kafka: The Early Years (published in October in an English translation by Shelley Frisch), Stach obtained copies of Brod’s diaries between 19, when Kafka was in his mid-20s. ![]()
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