KAFKA AND PORN

Custom Search

"To die would mean nothing else than to surrender a nothing to the nothing, but that would be impossible to conceive,  for how could a person, even only as a nothing, consciously surrender himself to the nothing, and not merely to an empty nothing but rather to a roaring nothing whose nothingness consists only in its incomprehensibility."
Franz Kafka - December 4, 1913 

 

Bearing this quote in mind, As many of you know i have been studying Kafka's work since i was about 18. The news that he was into porn, have caused quite a stir within the Kafka scholar's community. According to Time.com Ulrich Weinzierl proclaimed:

"Finally the literary stylite has fallen from his pedestal and is as much a sinner as you or I."
He is a Franz Kafka scholar, on the revelation that the writer subscribed to upmarket pornography.

 

 

 

Now what is the big deal about it? Today porn is far more hardcore than this lovely lady. James Hawes, a Kafka expert and novelist, claims in his book Excavating Kafka, published in Britain yesterday, that the writer was a subscriber to upmarket pornography. Furious German academics reacted by accusing Hawes of prudishness, sensationalism and even antisemitism. I say to those furious german academics that it is in our nature to be vouyearistic and no one can deny that, to be a part of our basic instincts.

 

Here is another image of porn that was found in Kafka's journals. Critics also dismissed Hawes' claim that Kafka kept his pornography under lock and key in a safe on his bookshelf, saying it contained instead a savings book he did not want his family to know about.
What we do with our sexuality is our own bussiness no one has to know about it if we don't want to. It's about privacy and freedom. Of course as long as youre not a pedophile!

What german critics need to do is relax, Kafka had needs and urges like us, and i am damned proud to know that he was a regular man like any of us. I have studied his works for years, never get tired of him. Now i admire him even more!

Now at least in my opinion, Kafka was a regular man like any of us, with urges and like many of us he enjoyed looking at porn. 

Now the Kafka's scholar community are outraged at the revelations. The images shown above are 1933 before the holocaust. Judging from the quote he wrote in 1913 we can interpret it by saying that the nothingness that he writes about encompass the void that we feel when we cannot do what we want.
Take for instance Kafka's life, he had to conceal his sexuality from his father. Being that it was unnaceptable to live as a single man and especially have a preference for porn. With Kafka being a single man and as old as he was also raised a lot of questions about whether or not he was "normal". Kafka spent much of his adult life living under the shadow of his father, whom he considered a titan, his total opposite and as we read his literary works we learn to cypher his desires to free himself from his family.
Ultimately the fact that he enjoyed pornography helps us understand once again his desires, to be a different man.