German scholars getting all touchy about Kafka’s pr0n

Image Transformation by Titus Davidheimann Beek.

I started getting links sent to me about the book Excavating Kafka by James Hawes, which is supposed to talk about Kafka’s porn collection — but I didn’t bother to blog it because it was hitting the blogs and some mainstream media. The scandal was that his porn collection had never been mentioned. And it seemed like there was no there, there for me to blog about, at least until the book came out: I wanted to know *what* the porn was before writing about it. Of course Kafka checked out porn and had to stash it; it’s a time-honored tradition. But the book came out today (Amazon.uk only right now) and German scholars are all inflamed that porn is mentioned in regard to the life of a great writer — but it’s important to know our great humans are indeed human, and sex is at the core of being human, and that’s why I think the critics need to get a clue. They’re saying the porn collection mention in the book is just a publicity stunt, that it’s gonna ruin Kafka’s image, that Hawes is antisemetic… I’ve heard it all before when people have bad intentions… your name is fake, you’re doing it for attention, all that sex stuff will ruin your chances for mainstream acceptance, your mom is a guy — yeah, fuck all that bullshit. Accusations are distractions. His writing was dark. Kafka wanked, and kept a collection. Was his porn inspiring? Now that would be the scholars’ true scandal, wouldn’t it?

The real fun question is, so — what *was* Kafka into? What Would Kafka Fap To? (WWKFT Bumper sticker, anyone?) Hmmm, think it was dark and dystopian, had women in uniforms, or was bright and sunny and happy “feel good” porn? According to the Guardian he was actually into “upmarket” stuff:

(…) Rainer Stach, a Kafka biographer, said the furore surrounding the book was an “unbelievable marketing ploy”. No one had ever said Kafka was pure and chaste, but the “pornographic” pictures were “playful representations, some styled like caricatures”.

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. “I don’t remotely claim it’s a discovery of mine, but I was genuinely shocked when I first saw it, because I had never seen it in any academic biography of Kafka. The experts’ conspiracy of censorship is entertainingly curious.” (…read more.)