H
ISTORIAN Saul Friedländer
ventures into Franz Kafka
scholarship with panache. Sex,
he declares, is the hitherto miss-
ing key to interpreting “the poet of shame
and guilt.” He states his main thesis thus:
“The issues torturing Kafka most of his life
were of a sexual nature.” One of his argu-
ments is that Kafka, while pretending that
he wanted to marry a woman, in fact de-
sired men—and young people of both sexes.
Kafka was engaged to Felice Bauer, twice, and also to Julie
Wohryzek, but none of the marriages ever materialized. He was
forty and dying from tuberculosis when he met Dora Diamant,
a 25-year-old from a Jewish Orthodox Eastern European fam-
ily who lived in Berlin. He moved out of his parents’ apartment
in Prague to be with her. They were together until his death a
year later, in June 1924.
He also dated Milena Jesen-
ská from Vienna, the only non-
Jewish woman he seriously
courted, though she was married
to a Jew. Milena remarked in a
letter: “I understand very well
that for him this great passion
means rescue from sex.” Kafka
himself once wrote to Max
Brod: “you are right in saying
that the deeper realm of sexual
life is closed to me.” In 1922, he
asked himself in his diary:
“What have you done with your
gift of sex? It was a failure, in
the end that is all that they will
say.”
Kafka was clearly unhappy
about his love life. But was it
because he was gay? His female
characters are often drawn as
base and menacing. His descrip-
tions of actual women are hardly
more flattering. He reported to
Brod on women he flirted with:
“Agathe is very ugly and so is
Hedwig.” Upon first meeting his
future fiancé Felice Bauer, he
paid attention to details: “Bony,
empty face that wore its empti-
ness openly. ... Blonde, some-
what straight, unattractive hair, strong
chin.” The fact that Kafka was able to ren-
der such a swift and decisive verdict on her
appearance might suggest that he was
straight, after all.
That Kafka was gay is speculative but
not implausible. Friedländer finds a diary
entry from 1912 that’s especially revealing:
“two handsome Swedish boys with long
legs that are so shaped and tight that the
best way to get at them would be with the tongue.” (The age of
the boys is unclear.) While working on
The Castle
, his last, un-
finished novel, Kafka wrote in his diary: “Struggle on the road.
... Happy little B. in all his innocence ... specially his out-
stretched leg in its gray rolled-up sock, his aimless wandering
glance, his aimless talk ... he wanted to go home with me.” In
another passage he refers to a fellow train passenger who had a
“big member” bulging in his
pants.
It’s harder to evaluate his de-
scriptions of male acquain-
tances. One friend is described
as “handsome,” another as
“good-looking.” Are these in-
dicative of sexual attraction, or
simply observations? That
handsome friend, Jewish writer
Franz Werfel, is described in
Kafka’s diary as “stooped, half
reclining even in the wooden
chair, the beautiful profile of his
face pressed against his chest.”
He wrote to Max Brod about
dreaming that he gave Werfel a
kiss, which would cause him to
“stumble into the middle of
[Hans] Blüher’s book,” namely
The role of eroticism in Male
Society
.
Friedländer then turns to
Kafka’s fiction for clues. In
The
Castle
, K. dreams that
a secretary, naked, very like the
statue of a Greek god, was being
hard pressed by K. in battle. That
was quite comical, and in his
sleep K. smiled gently at the way
the secretary was being con-
stantly startled out of proud pos-
ture by K.’s advances and
quickly had to use his raised arm
and clenched fist to cover up his
exposed parts, but he was not yet
How Straight Could Kafka Have Been?
y
OAV
S
IVAN
Franz Kafka:
The Poet of Shame and Guilt
Saul Friedländer
Yale University Press
200 pages, $26.
Yoav Sivan is an israeli journalist
based in New York. He maintains a
website at
42
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