Kafka’s Diaries

Kafka kept a diary from 1909 to 1923. It served as a biographical companion, literary sketchbook, and, in part, also as a medium for intimate communications, as it was not unusual in his day to distribute such chronicles among friends and family to read. After Kafka’s death, Max Brod published his friend’s diaries as valuable literary documents. Along with his letters, they are now an invaluable resource for researchers wanting to understand Kafka and his works. 

On almost every letter and page of the diary the reader is confronted with the image of the genius tortured by everyday life. The sketches from the last years of the poet’s life are particularly poignant: the notes of a sick man, at death’s door on the subject of his fraternisation with death. The macabre humour, which sometimes breaks through, makes a great deal of Kafka’s fiction truly comprehensible for the first time.

Ludwig Winder

Every little note in the diary, in the distinctive and unmistakably idiosyncratic style, breathes the essence of his works as if it had been cut directly from their midst, whether it relates to the most personal or the most abstruse of matters. 

Oskar Baum