5/23/2003
Reviewed by Michael Hofmann
If you know anything much about Franz Kafka's life, you probably know the wonderfully improbable episode at the end of it when, desperately ill and, in the Australian idiom, "happy as a box of birds," he shacked up in Berlin with a 19-year-old Hasidic Jewish girl from Poland. This was the break from his parents and Prague that he had dreamed of all his adult life, and astonishingly -- in a most un-Kafka-like fashion -- it came to pass. It almost seems more a part of his death than of his life. Everything was topsy-turvy: Kafka radiant, full of plans, eating and drinking, anxious to publish.
The "19-year-old" was the actually 26-year-old Dora Diamant, the subject of a new biography by Kathi Diamant (no relation). The mistake over her age, which she didn't care to correct, was made by Max Brod, Kafka's friend and literary executor. That she was devoted to Kafka and that he found unprecedented, unimaginable happiness with her are both incontestably true. "Kafka was always cheerful," she said, and being with him "was as if one lived in Paradise." The best testimonial to her came from Kafka's friend Robert Klopstock, who wrote the day after Kafka died, "Who knows Dora, knows what love means," and from Kafka's extraordinary bearing during his last months, first during the inflation winter of 1923 in Berlin, and then in clinics outside Vienna, Austria, to which his worsening tuberculosis finally drove him.
As in Keats's letters from Rome, there is real heroism in Kafka's dying months. In his letters to his parents and sisters, in the "conversation slips" he wrote when he was too sick to speak, there is a kind of florid gallantry, a rococo stoicism. "Cooking is so easy," he wrote to his parents. "Around the New Year, there was no alcohol for the stove; nevertheless, I almost scalded myself while eating; the food was warmed on candle stubs." Later on, in the sanatorium at Kierling, he thought insistently about drinking (his larynx hurt him too much, he suffered horrible thirst). "Lemonade," he mused on one of his slips. "It was all so boundless." He dreamed of drinking a beer with his father. To me, these scraps are more moving than Kathi Diamant's rehydrated narrative. I am grateful that her book is not indelicate, but I do find it sentimental.
After Kafka's death (on June 3, 1924), Dora's wanderings began. She was in Prague with his parents for a month; then she returned to Berlin. She studied to be an actress, joined the Communist Party, married a communist, Lutz Lask, in 1934, had a daughter, Marianne. She fled Germany, fled -- no one knows how -- the USSR in 1938, scraped into England in 1939, and was promptly interned on the Isle of Man as an "enemy alien." The few things she had of Kafka's were gradually lost. The Nazis took his diaries, letters and fragments; her collection of his books disappeared along with the man -- a poor Italian double amputee by the name of Lenar -- to whom she had entrusted them in Moscow in 1936, at the height of Stalin's Terror (she had what seems the ridiculous hope that they might be published there); the last thing, his hairbrush, she left behind in Israel, thinking she would go back there. (She never did.) She died of a chronic kidney ailment in 1952, in an East London hospital. Her daughter, Marianne, had an even sadder life, much of it in poor physical and then mental health, and died alone and neglected at the age of 48.
Dora was on the outer edge of the Kafka enterprise. She is not known to have been in touch with the family after 1925, and by some unaccountable mischance, her letters to Max Brod have vanished. It took her a long time even to be interested in Kafka's writing (she loved the man), she didn't give an interview about her time with him until 1947, and didn't attempt to write anything down about it until 1951, almost 30 years after the fact. Even then, words didn't obey her. Her notes -- one single notebook, with scrappy, frustrated, sometimes militant jottings in several languages -- were found among the papers of a French Kafka scholar she had befriended, Marthe Robert, who had made little use of them. Kathi Diamant was given access to them, but whether they are worth having is another matter: They contain much that is sentimental or commonplace.
Over the nearly 70 years since his death, Kafka has just kept growing. Dora has remained the same. She was haunted by him, never forgot him and learned to make something of her association with him. "I am the wife of Franz Kafka," she would on occasion proclaim. Her feelings for him, warm and anguished and protective to begin with, came to seem bland, distended, unfocused, religious, almost like patriotism or ancestor-worship: She once celebrated "his love for all that is genuine, pure, truly great." But it is not, finally, for her witness or even her life story that Dora Diamant will be remembered, but as the woman who gave Kafka her love and devotion in a way that he had never experienced before, and nursed him to the nearest thing, perhaps, to a happy death. It is as the Italian poet Eugenio Montale wrote: "Too many lives are needed to make one."
Michael Hofmann's translation of Franz Kafka's "Amerika/ The Man Who Disappeared" was published last year.
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