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Of course, we must talk about Kafka! The year coming to an end marks the centenary of his death, on June 3 1924, at the age of 40. Author of a multifaceted body of work, the Czech writer has been the subject of countless interpretations, making him “the most protean cultural figure of the past century,” writes Saul Friedländer in his very personal book published in 2013, Franz Kafka: Poet of Shame and Guilt (Yale University Press), in which he wonders where do these feelings of shame and guilt that haunt his work come from:

These Diaries and the Letters indicate clearly enough that – except for the constant pondering about his writing, the quintessence of his being – the issues torturing Kafka most of his life were of a sexual nature. So far, nobody would disagree: Kafka feared sexual intercourse with his female friends, was apparently disgusted by it, saw it as a punishment (in his own words); some commentators mention impotence; Jacques Derrida, in his reading of Before the Door of the Law, explicitly used, in a Freudian sense, the association to ante portas (“before the door”), that is, premature ejaculation. Yet therein we could be accessing the domain of shame, but unlikely that of guilt.

It is Kafka himself who prods us on. On August 26, 1920, he wrote to a female friend, the Czech journalist Milena Jesenska, possibly his closest confidant: “I am dirty, Milena, infinitely dirty, this is why I scream so much about purity. No one sings as purely as those who inhabit the deepest hell – what we take to be the song of angels is their song.” Something tormented Kafka, but he did not say more. All the sources indicate, however, that his feelings of guilt were related not to some concrete initiatives on his part but to fantasies, to imagined sexual possibilities.

Quite a few interpreters have occasionally alluded to homoerotic urges in Kafka’s life; but Mark Anderson seems to be the only one who has gone beyond sporadic allusions and considered homoeroticism as central to Kafka’s life and work. Kafka himself didn’t make things easy. Nowhere did he explicitly admit that he harbored homosexual tendencies. Throughout, Kafka pretended interest in women, courted women, commented on women, visited brothels, and the like. And yet, as we shall see, indirect allusions (but no admissions) to other urges abound in his diaries, his letters, and his fiction.

To be fair, Mark Anderson was not the first to consider Kafka’s homosexuality as central in his writings. Ruth Tiefenbrun’ s book, Moment of torment: An interpretation of Franz Kafka’s short stories, published in 1973 (Southern Illinois University Press) is entirely devoted to this topic. Although profoundly influenced by the psychanalytic theory and its clear excesses, the book is full of clairvoyant intuitions.

In the chapter Love, Sex, and Fantasies, the heart of his book, Friedländer writes:

Throughout the years, Kafka hinted at erotic feelings for a few male friends (Oskar Pollak, Franz Werfel, Vitzhak Lowy, Robert Klopstock), but that impulse certainly did not stop him from wooing women. His own confusion did confuse interpreters less informed and less vigilant than Brod. The discrepancies between Kafka’s diaries, letters, and other texts as emended by Brod and the new German standard edition highlight those passages that appeared problematic to the censor’s eye. At times Brod was just prudish, as when he deleted Kafka’s November 28, 1911, entry about the painter Alfred Kubin’s lovemaking technique as narrated by a chance acquaintance, a Herr Pachinger from Linz. Regarding another elision made on the first page of the Travel Diary, one wonders whether it was prompted by prudishness or by the suspicion of a homosexual allusion. Kafka describes his trip to Reichenberg in northern Bohemia, in January 1911. Opposite him in the train compartment sits a rather unsavory character whom Kafka qualifies as a “windbag.” He mentions his travel mate’s repelling way of eating and of disposing of the trash, completing the portrait rather bluntly: “The apparently big member creates a bulge in his pants.”

After reviewing Kafka’s male friendships, he continues: 

Allusions to homoeroticism are generally more open in Kafka’s fiction than in his nonfictional writings. In one of Kafka’s earliest stories, Description of a Struggle, the narrator and an acquaintance are discussing love on a hill above Prague, in the depth of night. “’You are incapable of loving,’ the acquaintance shouted to the narrator.”

‘Only fear excites you. Just take a look at my chest.’ Whereupon he quickly opened his overcoat and waistcoat and his shirt. His chest was indeed broad and beautiful. (…) Then, with a limp, distorted mouth, I got up, stepped onto the lawn behind the bench and whispered into my acquaintance’s ear: ‘I’m engaged, I confess it.’
My acquaintance wasn’t surprised that I got up. ‘You’re engaged?’ He sat there really quite exhausted, supported only by the back of the bench. Then he took off his hat and I saw his hair which, scented and beautifully combed, set off the round head on a fleshy neck in a sharp curving line, as was the fashion that winter. (…) My acquaintance mopped his brow with a batiste handkerchief. ‘Please put your hand on my forehead,’ he said. ‘I beg you.’ When I didn’t do so, he folded his hands. (…) Then, without further ado, my acquaintance pulled a knife out of his pocket, opened it thoughtfully, and then, as though he were playing, he plunged it into his left upper arm, and didn’t withdraw it. Blood promptly began to flow. His round cheeks grew pale. I pulled out the knife, cut up the sleeve of his overcoat and jacket, tore his shirt sleeve open. (…) I sucked a little at the deep wound. (…) ‘My dear, dear friend,’ said I, ‘you’ve wounded yourself for my sake.’

The English translation of Kafka’s story does not include version B of Description of a Struggle, and this version B does not refer to the wound; it is, however, far more explicit regarding the relationship between the narrator and his acquaintance. “‘You see then,’ I said. At that moment, he pushed my hands aside with a jolt, I fell with my mouth on his mouth and immediately received a kiss.”

Mark Anderson, who refers only to version A, stresses the homoerotic sequence triggered by the narrator’s confession that he is engaged. According to his comment, this brief sequence immediately leads from the “reality” of the worldly to “an unmistakable metaphysical anxiety”. Indeed, in Kafka’s texts metaphysical anxiety is never far from reality, in this story as in most others.

And further down:

Possibly one of the most explicit homoerotic texts in Kafka’s fiction is also one of his shortest parables about “crime” and “punishment”: The Bridge. The narrator is a small mountain bridge, spanned over a ravine and an icy stream. Nobody crosses the bridge for a very long time, until one day…

He came, he tapped me with the iron point of his stick, then he lifted my coattails with it and put them in order upon me. He plunged the point of his stick into my bushy hair and let it lie there for a long time, forgetting me no doubt while he wildly gazed around him. But then… he jumped with both feet on the middle of my body. I shuddered with wild pain, not knowing what was happening. Who was it? A child? A dream? A wayfarer? A suicide? A tempter? A destroyer? And I turned around so as to see him. A bridge to turn around! I had not yet turned quite around when I already began to fall, I fell and in a moment I was torn and transpierced by the sharp rocks which had always gazed up at me so peacefully from the rushing water.

I hope these extensive quotations will convince you to read the book. Best wishes!

Gabriel François