In defense of Kafka’s porn stash

last updated 8 January 2015

David Hugendick

Die Zeit

British prudishness knows no bounds, said David Hugendick. British biographer James Hawes has just come out with a new book about Franz Kafka, claiming that the esteemed author was a porn addict. It describes “how the author hid his dirty magazines in a closet, and even took the key with him on vacation so his mother wouldn’t find them.” Hawes goes so far as to reproduce some of the pictures! “Sex pictures, with animals! Oh, no, Franz!” Say it isn’t so! Actually, it isn’t. The magazines in question did run a few racy drawings, but they were mostly literary journals, filled with stories by “such smutty writers as Goethe, Rimbaud, and Wilde. Are you aroused yet?” The astonishing thing is not that Kafka read these journals. “It is that 100 years later an English researcher found them and cried, ‘Porno! Porno!’” Hawes claims he wants to reveal the dirty truth about Kafka—but German scholars have long known that the writer visited brothels and dabbled in erotica. “We can only conclude that Hawes doesn’t read German.”