The Diaries of Franz Kafka Read online

  David Veit, 19 October, 1794, Jewish kind of observation, therefore 90 easy to understand, as though it had happened yesterday.

  In the evening in Weimar, Der Diener zweier Herrn was acted quite nicely, to my surprise. Goethe was also in the theatre, and indeed, as always, in the section reserved for the nobility. In the middle of the play he leaves this section – which he is supposed to do very seldom – sits down, as long as he could not speak to me, behind me (so the ladies beside me said) and as soon as the act is over comes forward, bows to me with extreme courtesy, and begins in a quite intimate tone … brief remarks and replies about the play.… Thereupon he falls silent for a moment; meanwhile I forget that he is the director of the theatre and say, ‘They’re acting it quite nicely too.’ He still keeps looking straight ahead, and so in my stupidity – but really in a frame of mind which I cannot analyse – I say once more, ‘They are acting quite nicely.’ At that moment he bows to me, but really as Courteously as the first time, and he is gone! Have I insulted him or not?… You really won’t believe how distressed I still am, regardless of the fact that I already have the assurance from Humboldt, who now knows him well, that he often leaves in this sudden manner, and Humboldt has undertaken to speak to him about me once again.

  Another time they were speaking about Maimon: ‘I kept interrupting a good deal and often came to his assistance; for usually there are many words he cannot recall and he keeps making faces.’

  1796. Goethe recites Hermann’s conversations with his mother at the pear tree in first half of September.44 He wept. ‘Thus one melts over one’s own coals,’ he said, while drying his tears.

  ‘The wide wooden parapet of the old gentleman’s box.’ Goethe sometimes liked to have a supply of cold food and wine ready in his box, more for the other people – residents and friends of importance – whom he not infrequently received there.

  Performance of Schlegel’s Alarcos in 1802. ‘In the middle of the orchestra Goethe, serious and solemn, throning in his tall arm-chair.’ The audience becomes restless, finally at one passage a roar of laughter, the whole house shakes. ‘But only for a moment, in a trice Goethe jumped up, with thunderous voice and threatening gestures shouted, Silence, Silence, and it worked like a charm. In an instant the tumult subsided and the unhappy Alarcos went on to the end with no further disturbance, but also without the slightest sign of applause.’

  Staël: What the French apparently take for wit in foreigners is often only ignorance of French. Goethe called an idea of Schiller’s neuve et courageuse, that was wonderful, but it turned out that he had intended to say hardie.

  Was lockst Du meine Brut … herauf in Todesglut.45 Staël translated air brûlant. Goethe said he meant the glow of coals. She found that extremely maussade and tasteless and said that the fine sense for the seemly is lacking in German poets.

  1804. Love for Heinrich Voss – Goethe reads Luise together with the Sunday company.

  To Goethe fell the passage about the marriage, which he read with the deepest emotion. But his voice grew dejected, he wept and gave the book to his neighbour. A holy passage, he cried out with a degree of fervour which shook us all to the depths.

  We were sitting at lunch and had just consumed the last bit of food when Goethe ordered a bone ‘because Voss still looks so hungry’. But never is he pleasanter and more lovable than in the evening in his room when he is undressed or is sitting on the sofa.

  When I came to him I found everything quite comfortable there. He had lit a fire, had undressed down to a short woollen jacket, in which the man looks really splendid.

  Books: Stilling, Goethe Yearbook, Briefwechsel zwischen Rahel und David Veit.

  12 March. In the tram-car rapidly passing by there sat in a corner, his cheek against the window, his left arm stretched along the back of the seat, a young man with an unbuttoned overcoat billowing around him, looking down the long, empty bench. Today he had become engaged and he could think of nothing else. His being engaged made him feel comfortable and with this feeling he sometimes looked casually up at the ceiling of the tram. When the conductor came to sell him his ticket, after some jingling, he easily found the right coin, with a single motion put it into the conductor’s hand, and seized the ticket between two fingers held open like a pair of scissors. There was no real connexion between him and the tram-car and it would not have been surprising if, without using the platform or steps, he had appeared on the street and gone his way on foot with the same look.

  Only the billowing overcoat remains, everything else is made up.

  16 March. Saturday. Again encouragement. Again I catch hold of myself, as one catches hold of a ball in its fall. Tomorrow, today, I’ll begin an extensive work which, without being forced, will shape itself according to my abilities. I will not give it up as long as I can hold out at all. Rather be sleepless than live on in this way.

  Cabaret Lucerna. Several young people each sing a song. Such a performance, if we are fresh and listen closely, more strongly impresses upon us the conclusions which the text offers for our own life than is possible by the performance of experienced artistes. For the singer cannot increase the force of the poetry, it always retains an independent forcefulness which tyrannizes us through the singer, who doesn’t even wear patent-leather shoes, whose hand sometimes will not leave his knee, and, if it must, still shows its reluctance, who throws himself quickly down on the bench in order to conceal as much as possible how many small, awkward movements he had needed.

  Love scene in spring, the sort one finds on picture postcards. Devotion, a portrayal which touches and shames the public – Fatinitza. Viennese singer. Sweet, significant laugh. Reminds me of Hansi. A face with meaningless details, mostly too sharp, held together and smoothed down by laughter. Ineffective superiority over the audience which one must grant her when she stands on the stage and laughs out into the indifferent audience – The Degen’s stupid dance, with flying will-o’-wisps, twigs, butterflies, death’s head.

  Four ‘Rocking Girls’. One very pretty. The programme does not give her name. She was on the audience’s extreme right. How busily she threw her arms about, in what unusually palpable, silent movement were her thin long legs and delicately playing little joints, the way she didn’t keep time, but didn’t let herself be frightened out of her business, what a soft smile she had in contrast to the distorted ones of the others, how almost voluptuous her face and hair were in comparison with the sparseness of her body, the way she called ‘slowly’ to the musicians, for her sisters as well as for herself. Their dancing master, a young, strikingly dressed, thin person, stood behind the musicians and waved one hand in rhythm, regarded neither by the musicians nor by the dancers and with his own eyes on the audience.

  Warnebold, fiery nervousness of a powerful person. In his movements there is sometimes a joke whose strength lifts one up. How he hurries to the piano with long steps after the number is announced.

  Read Aus dem Leben eines Schlachtenmalers. Read Flaubert aloud with satisfaction.

  The necessity of speaking of dancers with exclamation marks. Because in that way one imitates their motion, because one remains in the rhythm and the thought does not then interfere with the enjoyment, because then the action always comes at the end of the sentence and prolongs its effect better.

  17 March. During these days read Morgenrot by Stössl.46

  Max’s concert Sunday. My almost unconscious listening. From now on I can no longer be bored by music. I no longer seek, as I did in vain in the past, to penetrate this impenetrable circle which immediately forms about me together with the music, I am also careful not to jump over it, which I probably could do, but instead I remain calmly in my thoughts that develop and subside in this narrowed space without it being possible for disturbing self-observations to step into their slow swarm. The beautiful ‘magic circle’ (by Max) that seems here and there to open the breast of the singer.

  Goethe, ‘Trost in Tränen.’ Alles geben die Götter, die unendlichen,/ Ihren Lie
blingen ganz:/ Alle Freuden, die unendlichen,/ Alle Schmerzen, die unendlichen, ganz.

  My incompetence in the presence of my mother, in the presence of Miss T., and in the presence of all those in the Continental at that time and later on the street.

  Mam’zelle Nitouche on Monday. The good effect of a French word in a dreary German performance. Boarding-school girls in bright dresses, with their arms outstretched, run into the garden behind a fence. Barracks-yard of the dragoon regiment at night. Some officers in a barracks in the background are having a farewell celebration in a hall that is reached by going up a few steps. Mam’zelle Nitouche enters and is persuaded by love and recklessness to take part in the celebration. The sort of thing that can happen to a girl! In the morning at the convent, in the evening a substitute for an operetta singer who couldn’t come, and at night in the dragoons’ barracks.

  Today, painfully tired, spent the afternoon on the sofa.

  18 March. I was wise, if you like, because I was prepared for death at any moment, but not because I had taken care of everything that was given to me to do, rather because I had done none of it and could not even hope ever to do any of it.

  22 March. (The last few days I have been writing down the wrong dates.) Baum’s lecture in the lecture hall. G. F., nineteen years old, getting married next week. Dark, faultless, slender face. Distended nostrils. For years she has been wearing hats and clothes styled like a hunter’s. The same dark-green gleam on her face. The strands of hair running along the cheeks, just as in general a slight down seems to cover all her face which she has bowed down into the darkness. Points of her elbows resting lightly on the arms of her chair. Then on the Wenzelsplatz a brisk bow, completed with little energy, a turn, and a drawing erect of the poorly dressed, slender body. I looked at her much less often than I wanted to.

  24 March. Sunday, yesterday. Die Sternenbraut by Christian von Ehrenfels – Lost in watching. The sick officer in the play. The sick body in the tight uniform that made health and decisiveness a duty.

  In the morning in the bright sun at Max’s for half an hour.

  In the next room my mother is entertaining the L. couple. They are talking about vermin and corns. (Mrs L. has six corns on each toe.) It is easy to see that there is no real progress made in conversations of this sort. It is information that will be forgotten again by both and that even now proceeds along in self-forgetfulness without any sense of responsibility. But for the very reason that such conversations are unthinkable without absent-mindedness, they reveal empty spaces which, if one insists, can be filled only by thinking, or, better yet, by dreams.

  25 March. The broom sweeping the rug in the next room sounds like the train of a dress moving in jerks.

  26 March. Only not to overestimate what I have written, for in that way I make what is to be written unattainable.

  27 March. Monday, on the street. The boy who, with several others, threw a large ball at a servant girl walking defencelessly in front of them; just as the ball was flying at the girl’s behind I grabbed him by the throat, choked him in fury, thrust him aside, and swore. Then walked on and didn’t even look at the girl. One quite forgets one’s earthly existence because one is so entirely full of fury and is permitted to believe that, given the opportunity, one would in the same way fill oneself with even more beautiful emotions.

  28 March. From Mrs Fanta’s lecture, ‘Impressions of Berlin’: Grillparzer once didn’t want to go to a party because he knew that Hebbel, with whom he was friendly, would also be there. ‘He will question me again about my opinion on God, and when I don’t know what to say, he will become rude’ – My awkward behaviour.

  29 March. Delighted with the bathroom. Gradual understanding. The afternoons I spent on my hair.

  1 April. For the first time in a week an almost complete failure in writing. Why? Last week too I lived through various moods and kept their influence away from my writing; but I am afraid to write about it.

  3 April. This is how a day passes – in the morning, the office, in the afternoon, the factory, now in the evening, shouting to the right and left of me at home, later brought my sister home from Hamlet – and I haven’t been able to make use of a single moment.

  8 April. Saturday before Easter. Complete knowledge of oneself. To be able to seize the whole of one’s abilities like a little ball. To accept the greatest decline as something familiar and so still remain elastic in it.

  Desire for a deeper sleep that dissolves more. The metaphysical urge is only the urge toward death.

  How affectedly I spoke today in Haas’s47 presence because he praised Max’s and my travel report, so that in this way, at least, I might make myself worthy of the praise that the report does not warrant, or so that I might continue by fraud the fraudulent or lying effect of the travel report, or in the spirit of Haas’s amiable lie, which I tried to make easier for him.

  6 May. 11 o’clock. For the first time in a considerable while a complete failure in writing. The feeling of a tried man.

  Dreamed recently:

  I was riding with my father through Berlin in a tram-car. The bigcity quality was represented by countless striped toll bars standing upright, finished off bluntly at the ends. Apart from that everything was almost empty, but there was a great forest of these toll bars. We came to a gate, got out without any sense of getting out, stepped through the gate. On the other side of the gate a sheer wall rose up, which my father ascended almost in a dance, his legs flew out as he climbed, so easy was it for him. There was certainly also some inconsiderateness in the fact that he did not help me one bit, for I got to the top only with the utmost effort, on all fours, often sliding back again, as though the wall had become steeper under me. At the same time it was also distressing that [the wall] was covered with human excrement so that flakes of it clung to me, chiefly to my breast. I looked down at the flakes with bowed head and ran my hand over them.

  When at last I reached the top, my father, who by this time was already coming out of a building, immediately fell on my neck and kissed and embraced me. He was wearing an old-fashioned, short Prince Albert, padded on the inside like a sofa, which I remembered well. ‘This Dr von Leyden! He is an excellent man,’ he exclaimed over and over again. But he had by no means visited him in his capacity as doctor, but rather only as a man worth knowing. I was a little afraid that I should have to go in to see him too, but this wasn’t required of me. Behind me to the left I saw, sitting in a room literally surrounded by glass walls, a man who turned his back on me. It turned out that this man was the professor’s secretary, that my father had in fact spoken only with him and not with the professor himself, but that somehow or other, through the secretary, he had recognized the excellences of the professor in the flesh, so that in every respect he was as much entitled to an opinion on the professor as if he had spoken to him in person.

  Lessing Theatre: Die Ratten.

  Letter to Pick because I haven’t written to him. Card to Max in joy over Arnold Beer.

  9 May. Yesterday evening in the coffee-house with Pick. How I hold fast to my novel48 against all restlessness, like a figure on a monument that looks into the distance and holds fast to its pedestal.

  Hopeless evening with the family today. My brother-in-law needs money for the factory, my father is upset because of my sister, because of the business and because of his heart, my unhappy second sister, my mother unhappy about all of them, and I with my scribblings.

  22 May. Yesterday a wonderfully beautiful evening with Max. If I love myself, I love him more. Cabaret Lucerna. Madame la mort by Rachilde. Dream of a Spring Morning. The gay, fat girl in the box. The wild one with the coarse nose, her face smudged with soot, her shoulders squeezed up out of her dress (which wasn’t décolleté, however) and her back twisted to and fro, her simple, blue blouse with white polka dots, her fencer’s glove, which was always visible since most of the time her right hand was either resting flat, or on its fingertips, on the right thigh of her lively mother seated beside her. He
r braids twisted over her ears, a not-too-clean light-blue ribbon on the back of her head, the hair in front encircles her forehead in a thin but compact tuft that projects far out in front. Her warm, wrinkled, light cloak carelessly falling in folds when she was negotiating at the box office.

  23 May. Yesterday, behind us, out of boredom, a man fell from his chair – Comparison by Rachilde: Those who rejoice in the sun and demand that others rejoice are like drunkards coming from a wedding at night who force those they meet to drink the health of the unknown bride.

  Letter to Weltsch, proposed that we use ‘Du’ to one another. Yesterday a good letter to Uncle Alfred about the factory. Day before yesterday letter to Löwy.

  Now, in the evening, out of boredom, washed my hands in the bathroom three times in succession.

  The child with the two little braids, bare head, loose little red dress with white dots, bare legs and feet, who, with a little basket in one hand, a little box in the other, hesitatingly walked across the street near the National Theatre.

  How the actors in the play, Madame la mort, turn their backs to the audience, on the principle that the back of an amateur is, other things being equal, as beautiful as the back of a professional actor. The conscientiousness of people!

  A few days ago an excellent lecture by Davis Trietsch on colonization in Palestine.

  25 May. Weak tempo, little blood.

  27 May. Yesterday Whit Sunday, cold weather, a not very nice excursion with Max and Weltsch. In the evening, coffee-house, Werfel gives me Besuch aus dem Elysium.

  Part of Niklasstrasse and all the bridge turns around to look sentimentally at a dog who, loudly barking, is chasing an ambulance. Until suddenly the dog stops, turns away and proves to be an ordinary, strange dog who meant nothing in particular by his pursuit of the vehicle.

  1 June. Wrote nothing.

  2 June. Wrote almost nothing.

  Yesterday lecture on America by Dr Soukup. (The Czechs in Nebraska, all officials in America are elected, everyone must belong to one of the three parties – Republican, Democratic, Socialist – Roosevelt’s election meeting, with his glass he threatened a farmer who had made an objection, street speakers who carry a small box with them to serve as a platform.) Then spring festival, met Paul Kisch who talked about his dissertation, ‘Hebrew and the Czechs’.