“The German-speaking world of Kafka scholars hit out yesterday over a British academic’s claims that the writer had a penchant for hard porn. 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. ‘Hawes has given us a look through the keyhole of a Kafka with his trousers down … but to call the illustrated magazines he subscribed to as hardcore porn, is like comparing a poem by Heinrich Heine with an advertising slogan for McDonald’s,’ wrote Anjana Shrivastava, a Kafka researcher on Spiegel Online, calling Hawes a ‘prude’… At the focus of Hawes’ investigation are pictures he stumbled across in the British Library in London and the Bodleian in Oxford of the pornography to which Kafka subscribed while in his twenties. They include images of a hedgehog-style creature performing fellatio, golem-like male creatures grasping women’s breasts with their claw-like hands and a picture of a baby emerging from a sliced-open leg. But Hawes, an Oxford graduate who teaches creative writing at Oxford Brookes University hit back at his critics, claiming that none of them had read his book and accusing them of operating a ‘conspiracy of censorship’. He said he had made no claims to have discovered Kafka’s penchant for pornography and brothel visits, but had explored why Kafka scholars had chosen to virtually ignore the topic. ‘We’re talking about a writer whose psyche the experts have been so keen to decipher. They have pored over every memorandum he ever wrote, every insurance report he ever compiled, looking for clues. Yet they have chosen not to show this undoubtedly very dark stuff,’ he told the Guardian.” — Guardian (UK)

It’s an axiom. Nearly every male writer in the history of literature masturbated. Probably a good number of female writers too. Shakespeare? A wanker. James Joyce? Pulled his pud. Author of the Bible? Yeah, probably him too, whoever he (she / they) was. Should scholars be surprised that a twenty-something-year-old Kafka enjoyed a little pornographic stimulation now and then? No.

It’s hard to see why James Hawes’ book, Excavating Kafka, has created such a furor. In recent years there has been a movement to humanize Kafka anyway. Louis Begley’s 2008 biography, The Tremendous World I Have Inside My Head, has also been accused of considering its subject from a familiar or even insolent vantage point. Furthermore, Hawes makes a good point. Kafka has been microanalyzed by scholars for the last fifty years. Seemingly every nook and cranny of his psyche has been put under the spotlight. How is it that this incredible thoroughness has hitherto excluded any consideration of the fact that Kafka subscribed to a magazine whose illustrations included a “hedgehog-style creature performing fellatio?” Somehow it makes you consider a story such as “Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk” in a different light.

Evidently it’s all a tempest in an academic teapot. Kafka’s taste in porn is interesting to consider, but it would be of even more interest were porn to develop a taste for Kafka. Imagine the possibilities for a Kafkaesque pornography — people turning into bugs while they fuck…

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