Franz Kafka. Die Zeichnungen.
My favorite gift of the 2021 holiday season arrived early, at the end of October. It was a package from Germany that contained a copy of Franz Kafka. Die Zeichnungen, edited by Andreas Kilcher.1 The book is magnificent. It tells the story of how Max Brod signed over legal possession of his personal memorabilia, including a collection of publicly unknown drawings by Kafka, to his secretary and clandestine partner Ilse Esther Hoffe as early as 1947; how Hoffe’s death in 2007 gave rise to a legal battle between her heirs and the State of Israel regarding legal ownership of the collection; how that trial ended in 2016 with the Israeli High Court granting final ownership to the National Library of Israel in Jerusalem; and how it took yet another three years after that for the whole legal process to unwind through international courts before finally, on the 15th of July, 2019, the four bank safes of the late Esther Hoffe in Zürich were opened and delegates of the Israeli National Library took legal possession of its contents, including Kafka’s drawings … all that and more is unfolded in Kilcher’s concise and compelling introduction to the book.
In editing this book, Andreas Kilcher did what Brod himself, in 1948, had proposed to do2—and then repeatedly and deliberately prevented others from doing, namely, to publish a book with all of Kafka’s drawings, accompanied by critical essays and a work catalogue, that would be released in several languages simultaneously (Kilcher FKZ, Einleitung 19–24).3 Franz Kafka: Die Zeichnungen is that book. It represents a true milestone in Kafka Studies, one that has been in the making for some seventy years but was produced by Kilcher and his team in just two years’ time after the drawings had become available in 2019. That alone is a remarkable achievement, and Kilcher rightly announces the newly found drawings as “the last big unknown in Kafka’s œuvre” (FKZ Einleitung 8).4 To me, the book feels like a breath of fresh air in Kafka Studies, a field that suffocates under the weight of ever more explanations, interpretations, adaptations, and translations of what is, after all, a relatively small corpus of works.5 Franz Kafka. Die Zeichnungen significantly expands that corpus. It offers scholars and readers the chance to re-boot, an opportunity to go back to the basics and, hopefully, to rediscover Kafka anew and just for themselves.
Ending decades of speculation, Kilcher’s book reveals that Brod’s private collection included more than 150 individual drawings by Kafka (not counting those in the Zeichnungsheft). Contrary to his stated intent in 1948, Brod ended up publishing only a few of these drawings piecemeal over a period of 30 years, starting with the famous six black figures or “figurines”/ “Figurinen”6 in 1937 and ending in 1966 with a total of 17 published drawings by Kafka (plus two more—Nr. 52 and Nr. 74—that Brod had already sold to the Albertina in Vienna back in 1952). The situation did not improve much in the 1980s, when Malcolm Pasley and other editors of the first critical edition in the Fischer Verlag gained more complete access to Kafka’s manuscripts (including those in Hoffe’s possession, but excluding the drawings) and published whatever drawings they found therein. In 1979, when Wolfgang Rothe edited Kafka in der Kunst, he was able to show no more than 17 drawings by Kafka (or 22 if we count each of the six black figures individually). By the time Niels Bokhove and Marijke van Dorst published their book “Einmal ein großer Zeichner”. Franz Kafka als bildender Künstler (2011 [12003]), that number had risen to only 41. Given this small corpus, both academic and public interest in Kafka’s drawings proved sporadic over time and remained inconsequential in the field.7
Kilcher’s introduction provides a detailed account of the changing reasons Brod gave to explain why he was no longer interested in exhibiting Kafka’s drawings. When the art historian Paul Josef Hodin, in the early 1950s, asked Brod for permission to exhibit Kafka’s drawings first in London and then worldwide, Brod claimed the drawings were too fragile and concluded they could not be exhibited anyhow because most of them were inside the drawing journal. Later, in response to the request by Fischer Verlag in 1961 to publish a book with Kafka’s drawings, Brod voiced different concerns. He argued that the drawings would likely fail to convince the public of Kafka’s artistic talent, and that he, Brod, had been unduly criticized for the way he had dealt with Kafka’s inheritance in the past and was now reluctant to expose himself further by publishing the drawings as well. Kilcher’s book reveals that Brod had reason to worry, because he had treated the journal rather carelessly over the years, cutting (and in one case ripping) individual drawings out of the journal to publish them separately (Kilcher FKZ, Einleitung 22).
The main reason, however, for Brod’s steadfast refusal to share Kafka’s drawings with anyone else—a refusal that the Israeli courts, half a century later, would consider evidence of Brod’s continued possession and ownership of the drawings even after he had gifted them to Hoffe—was actually testimony to the exact opposite: Brod knew very well that he was no longer the legal owner of these drawings, yet pretended otherwise in public and still acted as if he were (Kilcher FKZ, Einleitung 23). The price Brod had to pay for keeping up this charade was that he could not possibly hope to exhibit or publish these drawings without exposing his secret arrangement with Hoffe to his editors and curators and ultimately to the public at large. Brod was willing to pay that price, and everybody else had to pay it, too.
Speaking of prices, I hope you will consider buying this book. (Let me hasten to add that I was not involved in its production and am not profiting from it in any way.) For about $50, you can now feast your eyes on artworks by Kafka that, forty years ago, would have cost you some 100,000 DM to see in the original. That was the price Hoffe’s lawyer in Jerusalem quoted to the German publisher Michael Krüger in 1981 just for taking a look at Kafka’s drawings; the price for reproducing them, he was told, would have to be negotiated afterwards (Kilcher FKZ, Einleitung 23–24). Kafka’s drawings, no doubt, are expensive—the Zeichnungsheft by itself, let alone Brod’s entire collection, would easily have sold for millions or even tens of millions of dollars in public auction—but this book is not. It feels more like a gift to those who love Kafka.
Besides the introduction, Franz Kafka: Die Zeichnungen features two critical essays, one by Kilcher (Professor of Literature and Cultural Studies at the ETH in Zurich) and one by Judith Butler (Maxine Eliot Professor in Comparative Literature and Critical Theory at UC Berkeley), as well as a “descriptive work register” (Beschreibendes Werkverzeichnis) compiled and written by the Swiss artist Pavel Schmidt, who is also listed as a collaborator (Mitarbeiter) on the book. All three contributors have worked and published on Kafka for decades.8
And then there are the drawings. Franz Kafka. Die Zeichnungen showcases 170 full-size pages filled with marvelous reproductions of all of Kafka’s drawings—those that had been previously published as well as those newly discovered in 2019—along with dozens of other, smaller-sized images that adorn the critical essays. What makes these reproductions so special and different from anything we have seen before is that Kilcher had access to the original drawings by Kafka and was able to reproduce them from scratch. Previous editors without access to the originals—such as Wolfgang Rothe in his book Kafka in der Kunst (1979) or Bokhove and van Dorst in “Einmal ein großer Zeichner” (2011/2003)—had no choice but to reproduce the drawings based on first- or second-hand copies already published elsewhere.9 That explains why many of these drawings looked faint, tired, and droopy; they utterly failed to evince the swiftness of the lines that animate Kafka’s originals, as we can see in Kilcher’s book. In some instances, the image resolution in previous editions was so weak that the lines appeared interrupted or became invisible altogether, which significantly distorted the image.10
Kilcher, by contrast, was able to scan and reprint the original drawings using the best digital technology available. The result is an astounding clarity of vison and an almost palpable presence of these papers as you leaf through the book. Every word on the page, no matter how small, is legible; every mark is visible, and every fold and wrinkle in the original manuscripts can be traced by the eye as if it were a finger touching the page. Looking at the drawings, I often found myself following the varying thickness of the lines that were produced by the different amount of ink Kafka used—he drew and wrote exclusively in black (Chinese) ink or graphite—and the changing grip of his hand holding the pen and pressing it into the paper. In other words, the amazing image quality of this book makes it impossible to ignore the specific medium and the materiality of signification that sustains these drawings, and I could easily imagine the dynamic swerve of Kafka’s hand flying across the paper to produce the agile lines and figures that meet our gaze. And in cases where the drawings are embedded into handwritten text (such as in Kafka’s letters and diaries), we can see that the same lines and movements that characterize Kafka’s drawings also characterize his writing.
A good example is the postcard Kafka sent to his sister Ottla in December 1918 to depict his daily activities while convalescing in a Schelesen spa (Nr. 130 “Ansichten aus meinem Leben”). The same thick, horizontal macrons that adorn the written letters F and T on the front of the card also characterize the objects and figures drawn on its backside. Also on the front is a drawing of a sitting person crouched in between the written text (Nr. 131 “Kauernde Figur”). The figure is reminiscent of the famous six black figures Brod had cut out of the Zeichnungsheft and published separately in 1937 with the title “Schwarze Marionetten an unsichtbaren Fäden” (Brod, Über Franz Kafka 393). All these black marionets, the French art historian Claude Gandelman suggested in 1974, are pictograms: “Most of Kafka’s human figures can be seen as variations on the structure of the letter K” (269). Gandelman’s influential claim has been repeated so often since then that it has become virtually canonical in the field, a certitude rather than an interpretation: “The drawings of the black figurines,” Fellner declares categorically in 2014, “present variations of the letter K in space” (166).11
A key concern shared by all three contributors to this book is to resist this semantic reduction of images to words. Instead, they emphasize the independence, irreducibility, and non-representational quality of Kafka’s art, which “first and foremost explains itself by itself and not with regard to something else,” Schmidt insists. “In most of his drawings, Kafka operates in this self-explanatory world of autonomous depiction” (FKZ 296).12 At the same time, though, all three authors acknowledge and emphasize the close relation between writing and drawing apparent in Kafka’s letters and manuscripts. There is no denying that the written line and the graphical line in Kafka’s œuvre share similar traits and characteristics. For both letters and figures are made of lines, and the same lines keep (re)appearing in so many different constellations in this book that it is often difficult to say where exactly the writing stops and the drawing begins. “The line on the page is a sentence,” Butler explains, “but some lines on the pages are also graphical signs that develop into drawings along the way” (FKZ 283).13 Schmidt, too, repeatedly emphasizes the remarkable “closeness of writing and image” in Kafka (FKZ 337). Some of the drawn figures, he notes, cross lines with written words such that they “step out from the words, so to speak” (FKZ 301).14
If you keep staring at the lines, though, you might see something else, too. You might notice “how the graphical dimension of the line emancipates itself from the written text and adopts new forms” (FKZ 284), as Butler points out.15 This is the first important take-away from Kilcher’s book. Despite their shared characteristics and apparent similarity, the graphical line and the written line in Kafka function differently on the page. The graphical line
offers a critique of what writing can do, and it peels away from the restrictions of language. […] Kafka’s drawings are definitely not literary images, but images that have broken free from writing, so to speak, even though they repeat, in a different register, some of its most fundamental concerns. (Butler FKZ 282)16
Butler does not elaborate further on these fundamental concerns that unite writing and drawing beyond the surface of the page. But it is safe to assume she is alluding to the différance (aka the logic of the trace or the spatiotemporal gap) that constitutes all processes of signification regardless of their specific medium or modality of operation. Butler’s indirect reference to literary theory is noteworthy because it remains the proverbial exception in Kilcher’s book. Whether by agreement or by accident, all three authors resisted the temptation to assail these drawings with critical theory or philosophical concepts. That was exactly the right approach. I do not mean to deny that it is legitimate and likely productive in the long run to interpret Kafka’s dynamic figures as “lines of becoming” in Deleuze’s sense or as “beings of fiction” that constitute their own mode of existence, as Latour would argue— or as the “Huxleyian Epsilons” and “mass-produced humans” that Adorno recognized in Kafka’s drawings back in 1955 (315).17
But now is not the right time for more theorizing or fancy speculations. Now is the time to look and observe, to feel and reflect upon these amazing images that have been brought to light after being hidden in a vault for so many decades. Kilcher, Butler, and Schmidt do precisely that. They adopt a phenomenological gaze that aims to describe rather than interpret the drawings (however impossible that distinction proves to be in many cases, as we shall see). What they seek to avoid, in any case, is to make sense of these lines and figures too soon and without the proper care they require to return our gaze. These insightful commentaries are informed by careful descriptions of the pages: the authors follow the lines, read the texts, study the drawings and report to us in lucid prose what they saw and how they saw it.
Kafka’s drawn figures do not have a center. What we see is not a unified body, but body parts. They are made of lines that accentuate moving body parts like arms and legs, torso and head, but many of these lines are open and disconnected, and the sketched figure remains incomplete, incoherent, and fragmented. There is no core, no essence, no-body. “The figures are never a complete unit. The lines never really contain the body whose space they want to occupy” (FKZ 291), Butler points out.18 The same is true of the white space that exists in-between these figures when they happen to share the same page. Each figure exists in its own world. Schmidt refers to “diverse levels of reality found side by side” (FKZ 307) and diverse “motifs that are different in aesthetic and thematic terms so that each constitutes its own distinct reality” (FKZ 308).
Many of these figures “follow their own pictorial logic” (Schmidt FKZ 309).19 They are “raumbildend,” as Schmidt puts it (FKZ 301, emphasis CS). What he means is that the vaguely outlined contours of these figures provide the only parameter we, the viewers, have to construct or imagine the physical space that surrounds them. Kafka’s agile figures do not take shape in some pre-established, objective space defined by Euclidian geometry. It is more apt to say they enact the space that surrounds them. In drawing Nr. 6 (“Blatt mit sechs Zeichnungen, Rückseite”), the elongated arms and legs of the main figure on the right create a long diagonal from the bottom right towards the top left of the page, while the extended leg of another figure on the left leads our gaze back down to the bottom left side of the page. Together, these bodily lines create an “open-ended triangular composition” (Schmidt FKZ 301) that frames the scene like a tableau or a theater stage. Onto that stage, Kafka’s figures emerge as if out of thin air. They appear to bring their own space with them, a unique space in each case evoked by the very same lines that serve to evoke them.20 Each figure brings forth the world it comes to inhabit.
Butler saw the same figures I see, yet her description gives them a different appearance. She likens them to shadows, insubstantial and transitory. The body in Kafka “loses its form, volume, and weight. It dissolves like a shadow without social existence” (Butler FKZ 290).21 A literary example of this bodily disappearance is Georg’s death at the end of The Judgement. What remains after Georg jumps off the bridge is a disembodied narrative voice— what Joseph Vogl called “the fourth person” in Kafka—telling us: “Right at that moment, a seemingly endless traffic went over the bridge” (Kafka, qtd. in Butler FKZ 278).22 Butler comments on that sentence as follows:
An anonymous writer finally splits off from the figure and takes on solely the form of a written sentence after discarding the body […] so that the narrative voice may appear only as a written line, without body and without passion. (FKZ 278–79)23
Butler recognizes the same “fantastic power of eliminating the body” (FKZ 290) in Kafka’s drawings.24 In both his writings and his drawings, she argues, “we repeatedly encounter the desire or impulse to dissolve bodily existence into a simple line, without substance or weight, floating through the air without gravity yet strengthened by its loss of volume” (FKZ 282).25
These are astute and compelling observations.26 I merely want to add that these fantastic fictions of “disembodiment” (“Entkörperung,” Butler FKZ 282) on the page are counter-balanced by our own affective, embodied, embedded, enacted, and extended reaction to these fictions. It is precisely the fleeting nature of Kafka’s figures that makes me feel the presence of my own body in response. Kafka’s drawings, like his writings, simultaneously compel and repel our efforts to make sense of them. They do so with the help of stark contrasts on both the formal and content level of the image—e.g. big/small, high/low, dark/white, thick/thin, left/right, up/down, presence/absence—that function as cognitive metaphors in Lakoff’s sense: basic forms of human reasoning rooted in proprioception and our bodily movement in space. Kafka’s drawings, I would say, picture metaphors that stimulate cognition. Particularly in the Zeichnungsheft, Kafka practices a minimalist approach that sketches the figure with a few lines only and relies on the empty space of the paper to fill out and stand in for the absent body. Butler takes note of this (see the quotation above, FKZ 291, that opens section III). Schmidt concurs. “These remarkable omissions,” he claims, “allow Kafka to evoke the entire figure” (FKZ 303).27
I agree, though I would phrase it slightly differently. It is not the omissions as such—that is, Kafka’s creative use of blank space—that evoke(s) the presence of these figures, as Butler suggests.28 Rather, these figures appear because our visual nervous system automatically and sui generis supplies the missing parts and completes the figure in our mind. This was an important discovery around 1900, when empirical research by Gestalt psychologists proved the existence of involuntary neurological responses to visual stimuli that appear to be parts of a larger whole. Kafka himself was intimately familiar with Gestalt theory through his teacher Christian von Ehrenfels, a major figure in experimental psychology in whose weekly seminar on practical philosophy at the University in Prague Kafka participated during 1901/02 (Stach 228)— the exact same time when Kafka begins his six-year drawing streak that lasts until 1907. His rudimentarily sketched figures demonstrate the degree to which he understood and made use of Gestalt principles in his art. His skillful omissions on the page compel us to fill the void and assemble the whole Gestalt, whether we want to or not. Hence it is not simply an ontological condition of texts or images to be either heteronomous or autonomous, complete or incomplete. It is rather the effect of their dynamic interaction with different observers in different social contexts. There is no text unless it is being read, and there is no image unless it is being seen.29 Whether or not a work of art is non-representational or incomplete depends only in part on the image itself. The other part are the cultural codes and subjective interpretations viewers apply, consciously or unconsciously, to what they care to look at.
IV
The explicit goal of Kilcher’s book is to establish Kafka’s drawings as an essential part of his œuvre, a part that can no longer be ignored or considered secondary to Kafka’s writings. Kilcher makes a strong case for an “expanded poetics that includes the primary and elementary dimension of the image to complement Kafka’s ‘eros of writing’” (FKZ, Zeichnen und Schreiben 214).30 It is premature, and maybe impossible, to flesh out this new poetics in detail. But it might be helpful to clarify what the extended poetics should not be. It should not be about establishing Kafka as “a great artist” (Brod, Über Franz Kafka 395) in art-historical terms or trying to defend Brod’s claim about Kafka’s “Doppelbegabung” as both writer and draftsman (Brod, qtd. in Kilcher FKZ, Zeichnen und Schreiben 240). Brod might well be right (I certainly think so), but trying to validate his claim merely leads back to the same old debate about Kafka’s relation to Paul Klee or Wassily Kandinsky, to German Expressionism or Italian Futurism or the historical avantgarde in general.31 There is simply not enough material even in the extended corpus to make a qualified judgment one way or another about the artistic quality of Kafka’s drawings, and it is best to remain agnostic on the point.32 Butler makes a similar argument:
One might say that Kafka’s drawings are part of the less significant works of Expressionism and consider the case closed. But this collection, for sure, is too eclectic and interesting to justify that conclusion. (FKZ 292)33
This quote also hints at some of the productive tension that exists between the two critical essays in this book. Kafka, for sure, is a distinctly more Jewish writer in Kilcher’s eyes than in Butler’s.34 And the “poetics of non-belonging” (Butler Who Owns Kafka? 5) that characterizes Kafka’s life and work, according to Butler, inevitably brings to mind the cliché of the wandering Jew that Kilcher, in his critique of Janouch’s memoirs, rejects as trivial and misleading (Kilcher FKZ 212).35 Most importantly, Butler is less circumspect than Kilcher about studying Kafka’s drawing in relation to his writing: “Despite their autonomy, the drawings were able to gain it only by breaking away from the literary form” (FKZ 292).36 Kilcher, on the other hand, repeatedly refers to “the “privilege of the graphical”in Kafka: “When drawing and writing intersect, the visual has a kind of privileged status” (Kilcher youtube Literaturhaus Berlin 35:10).37
I am inclined to agree with Kilcher’s view, which has a long history in Kafka Studies and will undoubtedly receive more attention now than it did before.38 Yet Butler makes a good point, too: Kafka’s drawings in his letters and diaries do emerge from the stunted impulse to write. We know that Kafka’s hand movements must have been highly automated given the enormous amount of writing he produced, and in Kilcher’s book we can see evidence of a mechanistic force that compels his hand to keep moving: when it fails to record the correct word on the page, it breaks away from language and starts drawing. Pavel Schmidt refers to such instances as “Übersprungs-zeichnungen”; as he explains: “If you cannot think of the word or the right formulation or you lose your train of thought, then the writing mechanism can automatically assume the form of doodles and drawing signs” (Schmidt FKZ 349).39 Kafka’s creative impulse literally keeps moving along the same line from writing to drawing and back again. There is no hierarchy between the two.
Still, Kilcher’s extended poetics faces an uphill battle in the field. For more than half a century, Kafka scholars have emphasized again and again the overriding importance of writing in Kafka’s life—“There was no distinction between life and literature for Kafka. Life was equivalent to writing” (Born 267)—yet made little mention of his interest in drawing.40 Even the relatively few scholars who engaged Kafka’s drawings often did so exclusively in terms of his writings.41 And there are very few comments and reflections by Kafka himself about his drawings, particularly if we disregard the questionable statements Gustav Janouch ascribes to Kafka, as Kilcher argues we must do (Kilcher FKZ, Zeichnen und Schreiben 211–12). What remains is essentially a single—albeit important—reference by Kafka in a letter to Felice Bauer (dated Feb. 11/12, 1913) that begins with “You know, I once was a great draftsman” and concludes with the confession that “these drawings, many years ago, satisfied me more than anything else at the time” (Kafka, Briefe 87)—a quotation that is also featured on the back cover of FKZ.42
I agree with Kilcher that despite the playful and self-deprecating tone Kafka adopts in this passage, there are good reasons to trust that he meant what he said. Kafka, in his early years, seriously considered becoming a draftsman,43 and particularly the Zeichnungsheft demonstrates “his serious and intense search for forms, figures, and bodily postures” (Schmidt FKZ 332).44 Still, his confessed love for drawing pales in comparison to his famous claims about writing: “I am nothing but literature; I cannot be nor want to be anything else,” Kafka stated in August 1913 (Tagebücher II: 192).45 Here is a similar statement he wrote one year earlier:
Once my organism had realized that writing was the most productive development of my nature, everything flogged to it and left behind empty-handed all abilities that were primarily oriented towards the pleasures of sex, eating, drinking, and reflecting philosophically about music. I lost weight in all those directions. That was necessary, because all my powers together were so weak that only in unison could they barely serve the purpose of writing. (Tagebücher I: 264; 3. Jan 1912)46
What we learn from Kilcher’s book, however, is that the expressive medium Kafka uses—in this case, writing—is secondary to the primary and vital need to express his inner visions.47 Until about 1907, Kafka mostly used drawings to express himself, though he also wrote. After 1907, he primarily used writing to express himself, though he continued to draw until his death in 1924.48 In light of the similarity between the written and the graphical line in Kafka we discussed earlier, there is even a good argument to be made that Kafka did not change media at all but continued to explore the expressive and affective potential of black lines on white paper throughout his life. The crucial point is that Kafka’s life and work is primarily about artistic self-expression. It is not about writing.
In her monograph on Kafka’s drawings from 2014, Fellner made a similar argument. The drawings, she demonstrated, appear precisely when the act of writing gets stuck or interrupted for some reason—because Kafka runs out of ink or reaches the end of the page or gets distracted by noise or other people. These interruptions left distinct traces in his manuscripts that include hesitations, repetitions, and the striking of passages—as well as the sudden insertion of images and drawings. Fellner emphasizes in particular the cognitive effect of this intermedial interruption: “By means of the drawing [Kafka] can occupy a perspective in which the author becomes his own audience” (145).49 The mechanical prolongation of writing via drawing jolts media and perspectives; it allows Kafka to oscillate back and forth between an inside and an outside perspective of each medium. The emerging relations are “full of friction” (“reibungsvoll”), Kilcher points out, because writing and drawing relate to one another “not as pictorial writing, but as picture/writing” (“nicht als Bilderschrift, sondern als Bilder/Schrift,” Kilcher FKZ, Zeichnen und Schreiben 213). Kilcher’s wordplay signifies the autonomy of the image only at the graphic level (by means of the slash /), but not acoustically. I read it as a reminder not to over-generalize the poetics of Bilder/Schrift, which instead must be determined in each instance and for each case anew.
To repeat, the appeal of Kilcher’s book is not simply what it shows, but how it is shown. These high-quality reproductions present all of Kafka’s drawings, even those we already knew, in a new light. The book also provides answers to questions and mysteries that have plagued the scholarship on Kafka’s drawings for decades, and it corrects errors or mistaken assumptions that have become canonical in the field due to the limited information available until now. For example, the famous drawing Nr. 41 (“Bittsteller und vornehmer Gonner”)—the title is by Kafka himself—had actually been modified by Brod before he photographed and published the drawing in 1954. Brod covered up part of the left figure that now, for the first time, can be seen in its original form as drawn by Kafka.50 Another example is the well-known portrait by Friedrich Feigl that shows Kafka reading his story “Der Kübelreiter” as Feigl’s handwritten caption specifies at the bottom of the drawing. Since Kafka’s early biographers were able to confirm that Kafka did indeed read this text to a group of friends in January 1917, and since Feigl himself had been present during that reading, most scholars assumed that Feigl’s portrait dated from that exact time as well, and it became widely known as the only portrait of Kafka that was made during his lifetime. That turned out to be incorrect, Kilcher informs us, because Feigl’s
ink drawing was usually reprinted with the last line of its caption missing. Yet precisely that line dates the portrait from 1946. It was made for Feigl’s neighbor in London, the art historian Josef Paul Hodin, and Feigl used an old photograph of Kafka from the year 1916 as template for his drawing in 1946. (Kilcher FKZ, Zeichnen und Schreiben 244)51
There are many other clarifications and corrections in this book, but Kilcher also offers plenty of new material and fresh insights beyond what was known before. In his critical essay, he engages with the artistic work of Willy Nowak and Max Horb, two members of the Czech artist group Die Acht who are frequently mentioned by Kafka biographers and scholars but never seriously discussed in relation to Kafka’s drawings.52 Kilcher’s essay parses out these relations, and he further documents the profound influence of Japanese art upon Kafka, in particular the exhibition “Aus Japan” by the graphic artist Erik Orlik that Kafka and his friends from the “Lese- and Redehalle” at Prague University visited in November of 1902.53 Orlik’s “Japonismus,” Kilcher argues, left a profound impression on Kafka that can be traced directly to his drawings: “In fact Japanese aesthetics is far more evident in Kafka’s drawings than the aesthetic of the Kunstwart” (Kilcher FKZ, Zeichnen und Schreiben 223).54
As a scholar, Kilcher excels in situating Kafka’s drawings in their proper aesthetic, historical, and spatial contexts to elucidate them. As an editor, he wisely refrains from restoring these contexts or trying to undo what Brod did to the drawings. Although Schmidt identifies the exact pages in the Zeichnungsheft where Brod had cut out some of the six black figures, the editors chose not to restore these pages to their original state. Instead, they invite us, the readers, to restore that connection if we so please …or not. The choice is ours.
The same freedom haunts our interpretation of Kafka’s drawings. For it is quite obvious that these lines and figures will not look the same to every reader. In many cases, it is exceedingly difficult to describe what we see, and even Schmidt’s masterful commentary occasionally falls silent in the face of Kafka’s bizarre figures.55 These figures activate the viewer, literally, because throughout the Zeichnungsheft, we have to rotate the drawings or turn the book upside down in order to reassess what we see from a different perspective. Take Nr. 22 (“Zeichnung auf dreieckigem Papier”), for example. According to Schmidt, it shows a “more animalistic than human being” with “an animal-like head, a withered right arm, and striking legs” (FKZ 305).56 If you turn the image 90 degrees counter-clockwise, however, you will easily recognize two human figures with white heads and dark bodies, one possibly carrying the other. Naturally, I find this view of Kafka’s figure more intuitive than Schmidt’s, but the disagreement itself is evidence of the hermeneutic opacity of these drawings that allow for different perspectives and meanings to emerge.
Kilcher’s book elicits these perspectives and meanings from its readers. That is the real achievement of what Andreas Putthorn calls an “unfathomably beautiful book” that yields a “exhilarating and blissful reading experience all around.”57 I am quoting Putthorn’s words in part because they express a genuine joy that I know will be shared by many readers of this book for many years to come, and in part because Putthorn’s affective language highlights the irreducible phenomenological dimension of engaging with Kafka’s work.58 This is the second important take-away from Franz Kafka. Die Zeichnungen. This book invites us to look, and then to look again at what we think we see on the page. Readers who follow this advice will be rewarded with a profound aesthetic experience that is distinct, discerning, and delightful. I want to close with a quotation from Peter von Matt that struck me as true:
To endure a Kafka text just as it is, is the only proper way to engage with it. When we endure a Kafka text, something happens that is more than all of its alleged meanings. Because in simply enduring the text, we experience our own response to it, uniquely our own, as if the text had been written only for us. And that precisely makes it so.59
The same applies to Kafka’s drawings. Their ultimate meaning is that they are there for you if you care to look at them. I hope you will. Enjoy your Kafka!
Footnotes
↵1 In this Review Article, references to the illustrations section of the Kafka volume will be given by page number only, and/or by reference to the numbering in the volume, that is, “Nr. xx.” The contributions by Kilcher, Butler, and Schmidt in the volume are given their own entries in the Works Cited and are cited in the text with the author’s name and “FKZ” (“Schmidt FKZ xx”).
↵2 In 1948, Max Brod published some more of Kafka’s drawings to promote Kafka’s “Doppelbegabung” as both writer and artist (Über Franz Kafka 294; qtd. in Kilcher FKZ, Zeichnen und Schreiben 240). He also claimed to have “a large number of them still in [his] possession that shall be published someday” (Über Franz Kafka 294; qtd. in Kilcher FKZ, Einleitung 12). Note: Translations of all quotations from FKZ and from sources not in German are mine.
↵3 Both the French (Cahier DESSINE) and the Spanish (Galaxia Gutenberg) translation of Kilcher’s book became available shortly after the German edition, in November of 2021, and the English translation (Princeton UP) is scheduled to arrive in summer of 2022.
↵4 “Dieses Konvolut ist die letzte große Unbekannte von Kafkas Schaffen” (Kilcher FKZ, Einleitung 8).
↵5 In 1944, Hannah Arendt was among the first to highlight the massive amount of Kafka scholarship. Two decades later, Susan Sontag famously lamented that Kafka’s œuvre had been “subjected to a mass ravishment by […] armies of interpreters” (5). And 15 years after that, in 1981, the eminent Kafka scholar Heinz Steinmetz seriously advocated for a total moratorium of new Kafka interpretations in order “to allow scholars to catch up” with those already in print (Steinmetz, qtd. in Koch 193).
↵6 Both Gandelman (161, passim), in 1974, and Rothe (Zeichnungen 565), in 1979, opt for the term “figurines”/”Figurinen,” which implies a three-dimensionality that Kafka’s drawings lack by definition; one can argue that they wanted to highlight the plastic nature of these drawings. More recently, Fellner (2014; see below, note 11) likewise uses this term.
↵7 It is telling that the first Kafka-Handbuch, edited by Hartmut Binder in 1979, featured an entry by Wolfgang Rothe on Kafka’s drawings, whereas the two Handbücher that followed in 2008 and 2010 respectively (one edited by Bettina von Jagow and Oliver Jahraus in 2008, the other by Manfred Engel and Bernd Auerochs in 2010) dropped the topic. The new Handbücher discuss the figure of the artist in Kafka’s literary work (von Jagow/Jahraus 546–51; Engel/Auerochs 483–98), yet make no reference to his own drawings.
↵8 The focus of Kilcher’s scholarship rests on the Jewish tradition and Kafka’s relation to Judaism, while Butler mostly engages Kafka to help investigate the modern history of juridical norms and procedures particularly after 9/11; both authors have followed closely the Israeli trial and written detailed analyses and commentaries about the verdicts. Schmidt provides an art-historical perspective that calls attention to the complex word-image relation in Kafka, whom he frequently adapts into his own artistic work, most notably a book of 49 sketches entitled f.k.from 2006. Over the last decade, Schmidt has toured Europe and the US with an exhibition of his drawings called: “Pavel Schmidt: Franz Kafka—Verschrieben & Verzeichnet.”
↵9 “From among all the reproductions,” Bokhove and van Dorst (98) point out, “we selected the best ‘original’ to reprint in this book” / “Aus all den Abdrucken wurde das bisher beste ‘Original’ für den Abdruck in diesem Band gewählt […].”
↵10 See, for example, Kilcher Nr. 6 (Rückseite“Blatt mit sechs Zeichnungen”) compared to Bokhove and van Dorst Nr. 9 (“Sechs Läufer”).
↵11 “Die Zeichnungen der schwarzen Figurinen präsentieren Variationen von K im Raum” (Fellner 166). Similarly Sudaka-Bénazéraf 148 and Bokhove and van Dorst 94.
↵12 “Die Zeichnung erklärt sich damit zunächst einmal durch sich selbst und nichts anderes. […] Kafka bewegt sich in den meisten seiner Zeichnungen in dieser für sich sprechenden Welt der autonomen Zeichnung” (Schmidt FKZ 296).
↵13 “Die Zeile auf dem Blatt ist ein Satz, aber manche Zeilen auf den Blättern sind auch graphische Zeichen, aus denen sich genauso Zeichnungen bilden” (Butler FKZ 283).
↵14 ”Der Reiter kommt sozusagen […] aus den Worten heraus” (Schmidt FKZ 301; Nr. 5). About drawing Nr. 138 (“Japanische Equilibristen”)—one of Kafka’s best-known drawings also discussed at length by Kilcher and Butler—Schmidt writes: “The drawn figures and heads appear to emerge out of the writing” / “Die zeichenhaften Figuren und Köpfe scheinen wie aus der Schrift hervorzugehen” (FKZ 344).
↵15 “Um Kafkas Zeichnungen zu verstehen, müssen wir also in den Blick nehmen, wie sich die graphische Dimension der Linie vom geschriebenen Text emanzipiert und neue Formen annimmt” (Butler FKZ 284).
↵16 “Auch wenn die graphische Linie sowohl in der Schrift als auch in der Zeichnung präsent ist, funktioniert sie in beiden doch sehr unterschiedlich. In Kafkas Zeichnungen übt sie Kritik an dem, was die Schrift leisten kann, und löst sich von der sprachlichen Beschränkung. […] Kafkas Zeichnungen sind gerade keine literarischen Bilder, sondern gleichsam Bilder, die sich von der Schrift befreit haben, auch wenn sie in einem anderen Register einige von deren fundamentalsten Anliegen wiederholen” (Butler FKZ 282).
↵17 ”Menschen, die im Fließbandverfahren hergestellt sind, mechanisch reproduzierte Exemplare, Huxleysche Epsilons” (Adorno 315).
↵18 “Die Figuren sind nie ganz eine Einheit. Die Linien enthalten nie wirklich den Körper, dessen Platz sie einnehmen wollen” (Butler FKZ 291).
↵19 ”Nebeneinander von unterschiedlichen Realitätsebenen”; “Motive, die zeichnerisch und inhaltlich unterschiedlich sind und jeweils eigene Realitaten bilden” (Schmidt FKZ 308; Nr. 30); “[…] folgen einer eigenen bildnerischen Logik” (Schmidt FKZ 309; Nr. 31).
↵20 Take figure Nr. 32 “Figur in Fenstertür” (Brod called it “Mann am Fenster mit Vorhang”), which fuses together the right arm of the person with the side-frame of the window. “The figure and the glass door become a single whole. Does the figure gaze into the room or out through the door? It is a Janus moment. Interior world and exterior world merge together” / “Der Rahmen geht in den rechten Oberarm über und setzt sich in den Beinen fort, Figur und Glastür werden zu einem gemeinsamen Ganzen. Schaut die Figur in den Raum oder durch die Tür hindurch? Es it ein Janus-Moment. Innenwelt und Außenwelt verbinden sich miteinander” (Schmidt FKZ 310).
↵21 “[…] verliert der Körper an Form, Volumen und Gewicht. Er vergeht wie ein Schatten ohne soziale Konsequenz” (Butler FKZ 290).
↵22 “In diesem Moment ging über die Brücke ein geradezu unendlicher Verkehr” (Kafka, qtd. in Butler FKZ 278).
↵23 “Ein anonymer Schreiber trennt sich schließlich von der Figur und nimmt allein die Form des geschriebenen Satzes an, nachdem er den Körper entsorgt hat […] damit die Erzählstimme als rein geschriebene Zeile erscheinen kann, körper-und leidenschaftslos” (Butler FKZ 278–79).
↵24 “[…] eine phantastische Kraft der Abschaffung des Körpers und des Verschwindens” (Butler FKZ 290).
↵25 “[…] einen wiederkehrenden Wunsch oder Antrieb zu geben, die verkörperte Existenz in eine reine Zeile aufzulösen, ohne Substanz und Gewicht, in der Luft schwebend, ohne Schwerkraft, gestärkt durch den Verlust des eigenen Volumens” (Butler FKZ 282).
↵26 In a rich back-and-forth conversation with Kilcher, Butler also connects this disappearance of the body in Kafka to a “theological desire, as well as perhaps an anorexic longing, or maybe the link between the two” (Butler Literaturhaus Zürich, 59:00).
↵27 “Mit markanten Weglassungen erfasst Kafka jeweils die ganze Figur” (Schmidt FKZ 303).
↵28 ”At almost every seam, [Kafka’s images] are interrupted by the white space of the page. Indeed they are being held together more by a flat white surface than by flesh and blood or some ideal of corporeal unity” (Butler FKZ 293). “[Kafkas Bilder] werden an fast jeder Nahtstelle durch den weißen Raum des Blattes unterbrochen. Tatsächlich werden sie eher durch eine flache weiße Oberfläche zusammengehalten als durch Fleisch und Blut oder irgendein Ideal körperlicher Einheit” (Butler FKZ 293).
↵29 Schmidt’s commentary implies much the same, for example about Nr. 20 (“Alterthüm-licher Tänzer”): “Spatial dimension emerges through an optical reversal” / “Räumlichkeit ensteht durch einen optischen Kippeffekt” (FKZ 305).
↵30 ”[…] eine erweiterte Poetologie Kafkas, die den ‘Eros der Schrift’ um die primäre und elementare Dimension des Bildes ergänzt” (Kilcher FKZ, Zeichnen und Schreiben 214).
↵31 Earlier critics, like Ladendorf (1961), Urzidil (1965), and Gandelmann (1974) identified Kafka’s drawing as Expressionist. Ladendorf (300) compared Kafka’s “Jockey on horse” (FKZ Nr. 56 “Pferd mit Reiter”) with Kandinsky’s famous “Blue Rider”; Urzidil emphasized “the parallel between Kafka and Marc Chagall” as well as Paul Klee (91–97); and Gandelman declared categorically that “Kafka’s graphic work […] are [sic] almost a quintessence of the Expressionist Gesture” (Gandelman 258).
↵32 In 1961, Ladendorf still characterized Kafka as somebody “for whom the activity of drawing is highly characteristic even though it lacks the mastery of his writings” (Ladendorf; qtd. in Rothe, Kafka in der Kunst 44), whereas Rothe in 1979 was more cautious and tried to side-step the issue: “Since the importance of the known drawings […] within Kafka’s entire graphic-artistic œuvre remains open, we cannot make substantial statements about his status as a graphic artist […].” / “Da der Stellenwert der heute bekannten Blätter […] innerhalb des gesamten zeichnerischen Œuvres Kafka offen ist, lassen sich derzeit über seinen Rang als Zeichner […] keine begründeten Feststellungen treffen” (Rothe Zeichnungen 565).
↵33 ”Man könnte auch sagen, Kafkas Zeichnungen gehörten zu den unbedeutenderen Arbeiten des Expressionismus, und damit wäre die Sache erledigt. Aber diese Sammlung ist sicherlich zu eklektisch und interessant, um ein solches Resümee zu rechtfertigen” (Butler FKZ 292).
↵34 “[ …] and clearly Kafka did not identify even with the German Jews” (Butler Who owns Kafka? 5).
↵35 In her 2011 essay “Who owns Kafka?,” Butler insists that Kafka does not belong to anybody, not least because he himself never fully committed to anything or anybody unequivocally either. Instead, his life and work are characterized by “a poetics of non-arrival” (5), Butler suggests, a poetics of failing to reach one’s destination. “I have tried to suggest that in Kafka’s parables and other writings we find brief meditations on the question of going somewhere, of going over, of the impossibility of arrival and the unrealizability of a goal” (8).
↵36 ,,Bei aller Eigenständigkeit haen die eichnungen diese durch einen Bruch mit der literarischen Form gewonnen [ …]” (Butler, FKZ 292).
↵37 ”Dort wo Zeichnen und Schreiben in Berührung gebracht werden, hat das Visuelle fast eine Art privilegierte Stellung” (Kilcher, Literaturhaus Berlin, youtube; 35:10 min).
↵38 Brod famously claimed that Kafka’s “thinking proceeded along images, not discourse” (Brod, Über Franz Kafka 169), and Kafka himself frequently lamented his “inability to think” / “Unfähigkeit zu denken” (Tagebücher 18. July 1914; qtd. in Geyer 17). Artists in particular have suggested the primacy of the visual in Kafka and that “using language was possibly Kafka’s second choice only” (Geyer 16).
↵39 ”Wo einem das Wort, die Formulierung nicht einfällt oder der Gedankenfaden reißt, kann sich der Schreibmechanismus automatisch ins Kritzeln und Zeichensetzen verwandeln” (Schmidt FKZ 349). Similarly Butler: “If we can trust Kafka’s own words in this diary entry, he cannot write, so he breaks off writing and breaks out into drawing.” / “Wenn man Kafkas Selbsteinschätzung in dem Tagebucheintrag trauen darf, kann er nicht schreiben, also bricht er das Schreiben ab und bricht aus in eine Skizze” (FKZ 287).
↵40 ”Eine Alternative Leben oder Schaffen gab es für Kafka nicht. Leben bedeutete für ihn Schreiben” (Born 194). “Kafka had to write in order to live,” Peter Alden Mailloux (13) confirmed two decades later, and twenty years after that, Peter von Matt assured us again that “Kafka lived his life exclusively for the purpose of transforming his existence into writing” / “Kafka lebte einzig auf diesen Vorgang hin, den Vorgang der Verwandlung seiner Existenz in das Schreibwesen” (Neue Zürcher Zeitung 2009).
↵41 “Kafka’s drawings are above all the drawings of a writer,” Jacqueline SudakaBénazéraf claims (16). Fellner, too, discusses Kafka’s drawings only in the context of his writing.
↵42 ”Wie gefällt Dir mein Zeichnen? Du, ich war einmal ein großer Zeichner, nur habe ich dann bei einer schlechten Malerin schulmäßiges Zeichnen zu lernen angefangen und mein ganzes Talent verdorben. Denk nur! Aber warte, ich werde Dir nächstens paar alte Zeichnungen schicken, damit Du etwas zum Lachen hast. Jene Zeichnungen haben mich damals, es ist schon lange her, mehr befriedigt als irgendetwas” (Kafka to FB, 11/12 Feb. 1913; in Briefe, 87; qtd. also in Kilcher FKZ, Zeichnen und Schreiben 238).
↵43 During that time, Kafka “had not yet decided between an existence as a writer or as a creative artist” (Bokhove and van Dorst 92). Similarly Kilcher, Letzter Akt 20.
↵44 ”Wiederholungen und Übungen belegen, wie ernsthaft und intensiv seine Suche nach Formen, Figuren und Körperstellungen war. Mit Variationen sammelte er Erfahrungen und verwendete sie als erarbeitetes Werkzeug. Er entwickelte ein fundamentales Formenvokabular, das nach und nach einsetzbar und abrufbar wurde” (Schmidt FKZ 332).
↵45 ”Da ich nichts anderes bin als Litteratur und nichts anderes sein kann und will […]” (Tagebücher II: 192; 21. Aug. 1913).
↵46 “Als es in meinem Organismus klar geworden war, daß das Schreiben die ergiebigste Richtung meines Wesens sei, drängte sich alles hin und ließ alle Fähigkeiten leer stehen, die sich auf die Freuden des Geschlechts, des Essens, des Trinkens, des philosophischen Nachdenkens der Musik zu allererst richteten. Ich magerte nach allen diesen Richtungen ab. Das war notwendig, weil meine Kräfte in ihrer Gesamtheit so gering waren, daß sie nur gesammelt dem Zweck des Schreibens halbwegs dienen konnten” (Tagebücher I: 264; 3. Jan 1912).
↵47 There are plenty of passages that testify to Kafka’s vital need for self-expression, but do not specify the medium of writing, for example Tagebücher II: 167; 6. Aug. 1915.
↵48 Kilcher’s book includes dozens of drawings that date from after 1907 in Kafka’s letters and journals, on postcards, scraps, or any other kind of paper Kafka happened to find when he felt the urge to draw. Kafka’s last drawing presumably dates from Spring 1924, a few months before his death (Nr. 124 “Weibliches Porträt”). It shows a female portrait that bears resemblance to a photograph of Dora Diamant (Sudaka-Bénazéraf actually reprints the photograph on page 61 in her book). “Yet this reference is by no means certain,” Schmidt insists; “this drawing, too, primarily stands for itself.” / “Gesichert ist dieser Bezug aber nicht; auch diese Zeichnung steht zunächst für sich” (Schmidt FKZ 348).
↵49 “Durch die Zeichnung kann eine Perspektive eingenommen werden, aus der heraus der Produzierende sich selbst zum Publikum wird” (Fellner 145).
↵50 Interestingly, this discovery makes it harder for us to interpret the image, because the newly visible object is difficult to identify. Schmidt sees it as “some elevated headgear” / “eine überhöhte Kopfbedeckung” (FKZ 314) the noble patron holds in his hands, but to me it looks like a small person with a distinct head, torso, and extended arms perched on a podium. The non-identifiable nature of this object, I surmise, was the reason why Brod chose to cover it up when he reproduced the image.
↵51 “Die Tuschezeichnung wurde dabei meist um die letzte Zeile der Bildunterschrift gekürzt abgebildet. Doch eben dort ist zu lesen, daß das Porträt 1946 entstanden ist, konkret für Feigls Londoner Nachbarn, den Kunsthistoriker Josef Paul Hodin. Tatsächlich benutzte Feigl 1946 als Vorlage für seine Zeichnung ein Foto Kafkas aus dem Jahr 1916” (Kilcher FKZ, Zeichnen und Schreiben 244).
↵52 Cf. Binder I: 23–24; Bokhove and van Dorst 91–92; Stach 442; Rothe does not mention Nowak, Horb, or “Die Acht.”
↵53 There exists other recent research on this topic, though, most notably in Stach 237 and the comprehensive and insightful commentary by Fellner (62–77).
↵54 “Tatsächlich ist der ästhetische Japonimus in Kafkas Zeichnungen ungleich deutlicher erkennbar als die Ästhetik des Kunstwart” (Kilcher FKZ, Zeichnen und Schreiben 223).
↵55 A good example is Nr. 144 (“Umschlag Oxforder Oktavheft 5”), which Schmidt does not even attempt to describe in detail, but simply calls a “graphic representation [ …] whose interpretation remains open. Our associations have free reign.” /”[…] eine zeichnerische Darstellung […]. Deren Deutung ist offen, den Assoziationen ist freie Bahn gegeben” (Schmidt FKZ 347).
↵56 “Ein mehr tierisches als menschliches Wesen […]. Es hat einen tierischen Kopf, einen verkümmerten rechten Arm und markante Beine. Der rechte Fuß ist überdeutlich mit Ferse und Fußsohle, der linke Fuß stark verkürzt, ein Klumpfuß oder Huf. Aus der Gegend des Hinterteils ragt ein Kopf heraus, der als menschlich gedeutet werden könnte. Ein Unmensch oder Untier, vergleichbar mit dem berittenen Wesen (Nr. 24)” (Schmidt FKZ 305).
↵57 “ein unfassbar schönes Buch,” “elektrifizierend, eine beglückende Lektüre in jeder Beziehung” (youtube).
↵58 ”Die Parabeln sind ‘Rohrschachtests’ der Literatur und ihre Deutung sagt mehr über den Charakter ihrer Deuter als über das Wesen ihres Schöpfers” (Politzer 43).
↵59 ”Einen Kafka-Text auszuhalten, so wie er ist, ist die einzige Form der Begegnung, die ihm angemessen ist. Im Aushalten eines Kafka-Textes ereignet sich etwas, das mehr ist als alle seine angeblichen Bedeutungen. Im reinen Aushalten des Textes erfahren wir nämlich unsere Antwort darauf, unsere ganz eigene, und dann ist es so, als ob der Text nur für uns geschrieben worden wäre. Was er dann tatsächlich ist” (2009, Neue Zürcher Zeitung).
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