Dora Diamant, Kafka’s Last Love

Kafka met a natural and simple girl at the beginning of July 1923 at a holiday camp in Müritz on the Baltic coast: the twenty-year-old Dora Diamant, from a Polish orthodox Hasidic Jewish family. By the autumn, the terminally ill author had moved to Berlin to be with this, his last love. In the starving city, Kafka dreamed of emigrating to Palestine to open a restaurant there, with Dora as the chef. From his sickbed Kafka asked her father for the girl’s hand but his request was refused. When Kafka lay on his deathbed a few months later, Dora remained faithfully by his side. Only now, in the face of death, did he feel ready to marry. 

Sensual love deceives you about heavenly love; it could not do so alone, but since it unconsciously contains an element of heavenly love, it can do so.

Franz Kafka, Aphorisms

In the evenings we all sat on benches at long tables. A little boy stood up and as he walked out he became so embarrassed that he fell over. Kafka said to him with eyes shining with admiration: “How cleverly you fell over, and how cleverly you got up again!” When I looked back on these words again later, they seemed to want to express the hope that everything could be recovered – apart from Kafka. Kafka was beyond recovery.

Dora Diamant