Franz Kafka’s failed drawings
Franz Kafka died from tuberculosis of the larynx at the age of 41 in 1924, leaving no will. But to his great friend and first biographer Max Brod, he gave the impassioned instruction: “whatever diaries, manuscripts, letters from myself or others, drawings, etc. you find among the things I leave behind … please burn every bit of it without reading it, and do the same with any writings or drawings that you have, or that you can obtain from others …”.
With pious disobedience, Brod ignored this request, but despite some hesitations, he never published the drawings in any quantity. Many of them were lost until very recently when after a prolonged legal battle, the National Library of Israel obtained possession of the majority. Brod had given his entire Kafka archive to his assistant and “collaborator”, Ilse Hoffe (whom he renamed Esther, reflecting their shared strong support of Zionism). In the intervening years, some of the drawings were acquired by the Bodleian Library in Oxford, some by the German Literature Archive in Marbach, and a few by the Albertina in Vienna.
Brod had made various attempts to publish the drawings but always seemed to have got cold feet. After the Second World War, he became disheartened by what he saw as an insulting public response to his work on Kafka’s legacy and found various excuses to defer publication.
One of his solutions was to cut individual sketches out of their parent sheets, resulting in fairly vandalistic mutilations. But now, Yale University Press has bitten the bullet and produced a substantial volume in which every surviving drawing is reproduced in facsimile, two scholars have written commentaries, and Pavel Schmidt has compiled a Catalogue Raisonné, covering 163 items.
Throughout this history, there has been a belief that Kafka’s drawings amount to a body of work that parallels and, in some respects, equals his published output as a writer. The title of this volume, not to mention its appearance in this form, implies a canon of significant visual images, worthy of comparison with the achievement of other known draughtsmen of the period.
How to characterise this work? Does it offer any sort of counterpart to Kafka’s two baggy, bewildering novels, The Castle and The Trial, or the enigmatic short stories? There are some straightforward portrait studies executed in a moderately competent chiaroscuro pencil manner, and some assured but very simple diagrammatic designs featuring stick figures in black ink. (Some of these were used by Brod in his publications.)
But more considered studies, such as the sketch of Goethe’s Garden House in Weimar, are merely amateur. Everything else is crude, perfunctory, and, I’m afraid, charmless. Clearly, this is material ripe for psychiatric analysis, and as a way of shining light on Kafka’s strange mind should certainly be preserved in the public domain. The book will always have that use.
There’s a slight sketch that seems to show a body being subjected to torture, but it’s a mere diagram, not an informative study of the human frame under stress. There’s a very unpleasant ink caricature of an angry man, who might perhaps be a portrait of Kafka’s overbearing father, with whom he had a complicated relationship; the catalogue doesn’t venture that interpretation so I’m no doubt wrong.
There’s another ugly sketch of a horse pulling a hearse up a steep hill, and here the cataloguer goes to great lengths to describe what it appears to show, but the image is so crude that it yields nothing of interest even when thus expounded. As works of art — as fine, let alone great, draughtsmanship — these drawings don’t pass the starting-post.
They fail even as comedy. If there’s anything to laugh at here it’s the learned authors’ earnest attempts to treat the drawings as seriously as they consider them to deserve. They tie themselves in pretentious knots as they try to extract profound sense from what are just doodles: many of the drawings are the typical products of compulsive untalented scribbling, reverting repeatedly to simple formulaic patterns: there are comically (but hardly funny) high-stepping figures, squashed faces in profile, galloping horses – very often barely more than just indicated on the page.
Any sort of narrative or factual subject matter is rare, and presented so obliquely that it’s scarcely discernible – a possible parallel with the prose here, perhaps. And since there’s no aesthetic pleasure to be gained from prolonged looking, one quickly gives up the attempt. I think Kafka’s own valuation of them was roughly correct.