>From The Times
August 2, 2008
Franz Kafka's porn brought out of the closet
Dalya Alberge, Arts Correspondent
A stash of explicit pornography belonging to Franz Kafka has emerged after being ignored by scholars anxious to preserve the writer's image, new research suggests.
Having stumbled by chance across the material in copies of his journals in the British Library in London and the Bodleian in Oxford, James Hawes, an academic and Kafka expert, reveals some of this erotic material in Excavating Kafka, published this month.
The pornography's publisher, Franz Blei, was also the man who first published Kafka in 1908 – a series of miniature stories later gathered in his book Meditation.
Dr Hawes, an admirer of Kafka, whose classics include The Metamorphosis, says that the discovery of the author's stash shows him as more human than his popular quasi-saintly image. But even today the pornography would be on the top shelf."These are not naughty postcards from the beach," Dr Hawes said. "They are undoubtedly porn, pure and simple. Some of it is quite dark. It's quite unpleasant.
"Academics have pretended it did not exist. The Kafka industry doesn't want to know such things about its idol."
He added: "Of the world's authors, only Shakespeare generates more PhDs, more biographies, more coffee-table books. Everything Kafka wrote, every postcard he ever sent, every page of his diary is regarded as a potential Ark of the Covenant. Yet no one has ever shown his readers Kafka's porn."
The title of the journals, The Amethyst/Opals, reveals nothing about their contents. Kafka kept them locked at his parents' house where he lived, taking the key on holiday.
-- My humanity is in feeling we are all voices of the same poverty. - Jorge Louis Borges