Kafka: I am in Venice, like an animal lying on the ground…

The lives of great writers remain an unexplored continent even when critics seem to have brought out every detail. Confirmation comes from a unique discovery made by Hartmut Binder, a German scholar among the leading experts on Kafka. The author of seminal biographical contributions, commentaries, and studies on Prague literature, Bender has devoted himself in recent years to publishing an enormous collection of rare old photographs, photos, and postcards, accompanied by concise and essential annotations. Precious volumes on the historical world of Kafka, last 2021 dedicated to a fading Prague of cafés, nightclubs, and medley written by an author the shift It was very close. It is also the largest study of Kafka’s travels in Italy: Kafka is dead in Den Soden (With Kafka in the southVitalis 2007.

This patient’s photo work made it possible to place a photograph of Kafka believed to have been taken exactly on the beach in Travemünde. Instead, Binder takes us back to Italy and more specifically to the Lido in Venice where Kafka went in 1913. The structure that appears behind the writer and the stranger in his company is actually a structure The Great Baths Foundationas revealed by a postcard of the time reproduced on Kafka Courier No. 5 (Wallstein Verlag, 2023). Kafka arrived in Venice on September 15, 1913, leaving behind a painful condition to say the least. after writing The freak His artistic vein has dried up. The relationship with Berliner Felice Bauer, consisting almost entirely of letters, completely absorbed him and reached the point of no return, even if there were two fleeting engagements. To write, he needed an intense solitude, not of a lonely person, as he explained, but of a dead man. The previous week in Vienna, he had been bouncing back and forth between a conference of the Occupational Accident Insurance Institute at which he works and the Eleventh International Zionist Congress. Worlds so alien to him that he would like to erase those days from his life, “perhaps from the roots.”

He arrives in Venice on a steamer from Trieste, a “ridiculously short” voyage that turns into a horrific nightmare. But then a completely different scenario opens up before him. “At last in Venice,” he writes, echoing I travel to Italy his language with him. He takes up residence at the Hotel Sandwirth (today’s Gabrielli) in Riva degli Schiavoni where there is a plaque commemorating his stay. The clarity of the sky is wondrous, and he would not have the strength to resist if his state of mind did not bow to him. Would you like to stay longer. He writes to Max Brod at the very moment the young man is looking at him through the open window: We do not know what he did in those days. A postcard and two letters are the only evidence of Venice that seems to have left no trace in his works, except perhaps the figure of Casanova. Memory of arrest, imprisonment and escape to Piombi delle Diary In fact it appears transformed on some pages of the practical.

According to Binder, it is likely that, as on his other travels, he soon preferred the beaches of the Lido to the centre. A place to get away from the hustle and bustle of the city. But we must also add fuel to a very particular passion for literary paths, following in the footsteps of Goethe and Thomas Mann. Death in VeniceBender, recalls, had come out in the fall of 1912 on Neue Rundschau And Kafka, a voracious reader of Mann who enjoyed his signature imitations, must have known her. A few days earlier he could have met Adolf Loos, Karl Krause, Peter Altenburg and Georg Trakl who dedicated wonderful verses to Venice. A constellation of great Austrians whom he admired, above all Trakl, and whom he would never meet, also because of the rift that arose between Krause and Max Brod.

The picture depicts an unusually smiling Kafka in a bathing suit. Kafka’s lover of laughter, outdoor life, and swimming that Max Brod insisted so much in his autobiography to correct the image that established itself through his works, but to no avail. But even in this picture there is something escapist, not only to the person sitting next to him, but perhaps to Kafka’s smile that makes one think of what he would write to Milena Jesenska a few years later before meeting her in Vienna. Had she opened the door for him, she would have found before him a thin man, smiling sweetly, not on purpose but out of embarrassment, and sitting last where indicated to him. “Though the party will end because he will hardly speak, and that is why he lacks life force… he will not be happy, and that is also why he lacks life force.”

However, in that photo taken on the beach, there is also a moment of childlike abandonment of a kind of lightness and free life, fleeting but not impossible that remains etched in the memory. In life, as in Kafka’s letters, there is an oscillation between the literal and the metaphorical, difficult to decipher, which points to another dimension no less than reality, which is spirit and writing. Controversial honesty coexists in many pages of Kafka’s diaries and letters with long distances, clarity of his gaze with the darkness of the den and inner life, nostalgia for the liveliness of the world with a sense of tarnishing and having to part. It is through the gradual dematerialization of writing. This is the neurosis that accompanies Kafka’s existence and from which his posthumous work was largely born. The Kafka smiling on the beach is the same Kafka who describes himself to Phyllis Bauer on the map of the Sandworth Hotel as an animal lying on the ground that cannot be moved. “I am here alone, hardly speaking to anyone, except the hotel clerks, my grief is almost overflowing, and yet, I seem to be in a state suitable to me, charged with a higher justice, which I was not allowed to overcome and which I will have to carry on to the end.” He concludes succinctly: “We must take our leave.”

Kafka left Venice on 20 September. Passing through Verona and Desenzano, he arrives at the doctor von Hartongen’s sanatorium in Riva del Garda, another literary microcosm in which the Mann brothers have resided. A few days later, he confessed to Max Brod that he had not written anything, not even in his diary. It was only traveled within the “caves” themselves. He had the desire to plunge into the “center of silence”, in the most extreme solitude that was necessary for him. The solitude of men after their death, which we may also call death, “which for us is called life,” said Nietzsche.