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The Kafka of the Diaries:

The Elusive Search for Meaning: Encountering a Fragmented Self

One of the hallmarks of civilisation is the preservation of collective memory – mainly through
its recording of its history. For any individual, a main trait of their sense of selfhood may well be a
typed or, more rarely these days, a hand-written personal diary. Those few brave souls who like to
publicise their existence over the Internet may publish their personal thoughts in the form of a blog.
Essentially, to write a diary is to engage in self-talk, and for anyone who does not have a close
confidant, a caring ear to listen to them, well then, the private pages of a diary will serve that
important purpose. Many people declare that they prefer to keep their diary thoughts private, and
yet many who write them either unconsciously (most often) or consciously (least often) desire them
to be read. Certainly, writers who keep diaries use them as record books for their thoughts,
observations, dreams, storylines, plots, poems, insights, hunches, a delightful playing with words,
cartooning, and so on. In a sense, diaries, for a writer, replaced the more traditional
1
commonplaces, which authors often kept way back in the early twentieth, nineteenth and previous
centuries. Therefore, diaries, in this tradition, provided source material for the writer’s novels,
poems, articles and so forth.

Let me return here to a thought I expressed briefly in my opening remarks, that is, that to write a
diary is to engage in self-talk. When a diarist commits his or her thoughts to paper, this is exactly
what they are doing: describing themselves, asking themselves questions, listening to those
questions, letting them sound in their minds before they may or may not attempt to answer them. In
short, they are engaged in a personal romance, or struggle, depending on the writer’s character or
disposition – a romance or struggle with the self, a romance or struggle that seeks to describe what
the personal project of the self may be.

There are many reasons that can be adduced for the benefits of diary keeping. Some of the best
that I have heard over the years concern (i) clarifying one’s goals and aims in life, (ii) elucidating
one’s thoughts and beliefs, (iii) working out one’s feelings about the various relationships one is
involved in, (iv) most importantly learning about one’s “self” and (v) in consequence of the first

1
A commonplace book or a commonplace was a scrapbook in which an author or writer would collect all types of information: everything from
recipes, directions, train times, weather reports, advertisements and quotations to snippets of letters, poems, short stories, chapters from novels, books
reviews, theatre or opera reviews and descriptions of characters he or she met in the course of their day. All of this would provide a source book for
all types of creative writing.
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four, becoming a far better communicator with others. I suggest here in this short article that Franz
Kafka: Diaries, 1910 – 1923 2 fulfilled all these five functions, and more, in the life of the great
Czech modernist writer Franz Kafka (1883 – 1924). The “more,” of course, would comprise what I
have mentioned above about diaries providing a sort of writer’s scrapbook or workbook or source
book, or indeed, what used to be called a commonplace book. Most of the things involved in such a
book appear in what Max Brod calls Kafka’s diaries 3, and one can notice how precise and accurate
a people-observer and place-describer he is as he describes in detail both the people and places he
encountered them in, and how such would all help in his more professional writing. Also we
encounter numerous stories and excerpts from novels and stories in these pages. Therefore, it is
important for us to remember that all the thoughts and feelings he shares with us in these pages are
all inextricably bound up with his vocation as a writer, and that often he expressed his depression at
being unable to write as well or as much as he really desired.

However, granted this inextricable link with his creative writing, his diaries played a far more
important role, I argue here, than a mere quarry from which to dig inspiration for his creative
writing. More importantly, they provided a safety valve for a very sensitive and fragile soul like
Franz Kafka to share his deepest thoughts and feelings also. As one reads these diaries, one is
entering into a personal encounter with their writer; indeed, with a person who, one realises all too
quickly, is perhaps more than too sensitive for this harsh world; with a person who is given to
severe bouts of self-doubt; further, with a sensitive soul who is subject to severe depression; with a
conflicted man who doubts himself at every turn; with a person who quintessentially sums up the
angst-ridden life of modern man. We meet a soul in turmoil, a fragmented man, looking for some
overall pattern in his little and all too broken life. In short, as my title of this essay indicates, we
encounter a fragmented self in search of an all too elusive wholeness.4

In the following numbered points, what I wish to outline is Kafka’s vain attempt to patch
together some integral sense of self, the search for which he felt was a futile task anyway, and
perhaps we as readers or devotees believe to be a little less so, from the various fragments and

2
Edited by Max Brod (Schocken Books: New York, 1948, 1976)
3
Here, it is timely to point out that Kafka did not write diaries per se, though he kept a lot of notebooks (which, as I’ve stated, were often more in the
nature of commonplaces) throughout which he noted very personal feelings and observations that we would naturally find in diaries. Richard T. Gray
et al. (2005, p. 264) point out quite correctly that “Brod selected from the papers Kafka left at his death those materials that most resembled diary
entries and published them as Kafka’s Diaries.” However, these diaries offer us a wonderful insight into the mind of a great writer and a tormented
and conflicted human being, and for this we must ever be indebted to Mr Brod.
4
In psychotherapeutic terms one could say that the pursuit of wholeness or some sense of an integrated self is the goal of all psychotherapeutic
encounters as it would be the goal of every human person with respect to self-development in order to lead a life of fulfilment and optimum well
being. It is apparent, if we are to go on the biographical details supplied by his biographers and his more autobiographical works, facts that are
reflected in his more creative oeuvre, Franz Kafka, unfortunately, never reached such a personal integration.
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experiences of his intense life. The points are in no specific order, either hierarchical or otherwise.
They merely are the points that struck this particular reader when he engaged with this profoundly
intense and moving book.

1. What Kafka thought about keeping Diaries

It is interesting to start with why Kafka felt he had to keep a diary or diaries or notebooks. In an
entry from the 16th of December, 1910 we read: “I won’t give up the diary again. I must hold on
here, it is the only place I can.” 5 We quickly realise that this mightn’t necessarily be an existential
cry, or a cry of angst or despair, as the notes of that and the following night contextualise this
feeling within his high expectations of himself as a writer and his consequent feeling of failure
6
when he doesn’t reach those self-imposed standards. However, one suspects that there is an
undertone of desperation to his statement that his diaries are the only place he can “hold on.”

Exactly a year later on 23rd of December, 1911 Kafka notes the insights a diary gives a person
into his personal and emotional development: “One advantage in keeping a diary is that you
become aware with reassuring clarity of the changes which you constantly suffer [= experience]....”
and he declares that in the pages of the diary you will find that you have come through many
difficult situations before which you would not have believed you were able to survive in the first
place, “and for that very reason we have got to admit the courage of our earlier striving in which we
persisted even in sheer ignorance.” 7

Finally some ten years later, on the 15th of October 1921 he talks about the freedom he feels at
abandoning diary keeping. Yet, like all Kafka’s views on his writing, whether creative or personal
or both or otherwise, indeed, we tend not to take him fully at his word as his views with respect to
the quality of his writing fluctuated vastly from time to time. We know instinctively that we are
reading the words and attempting to divine the feelings of a deeply conflicted man. Indeed, he tells
us that he did not destroy those diaries in this October entry, but rather that he had deliberately
given them to his soul-friend Max Brod, whom he designates as simply M in his diaries. In fact, he
tells us that he will still keep a diary of sorts, but it will be a diary with a difference as he no longer
needs to remind himself of every little occurrence or happening. He, then, rather strangely says that
probably he could write a diary about Max, but that would only end up being far too much a
biography about himself. One might wonder, but there is no evidence to prove it, that this might
5
Diaries p. 29.
6
See Ibid., p. 30
7
Diaries, p. 145
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hint at some suppressed homosexual attraction between him and his best friend. Such idle
speculation need not detain us here whatsoever, because it is beyond the scope of our present essay
and it is a topic that would require an in-depth study that would be an essay, indeed a book, in
itself. However, at this stage in his life, he was well aware of his impending death from
tuberculosis, and was undoubtedly coming to terms with that grim fact, and he finishes his musings
on diary-keeping here with these rather angst-ridden words: “I no longer need to make myself so
minutely conscious of such things [his memories], I am not so forgetful as I used to be in this
respect, I am a memory come alive, hence my insomnia.” 8

I will now proceed to highlight certain qualities, topics, insights and ideas in no particular order
that struck me as a rather devoted reader of these Diaries.

2. Depression and Despair

We live in a more fortunate time in history than did the likes of Kafka. For all intents and
purposes the bacterium that causes tuberculosis has been very much controlled in the Western
World and the Northern hemisphere, and hence no one in these parts has to live under the sentence
of death under which Kafka had to live. Moreover, we are very much more in control of depression
today where we have more effective medication and we also have a litany of various therapies and
literally thousands of self-help books to hand to help us through our mental ill-health. We are also
very much aware, of course, of how inextricably interrelated are our bodily health and mental well-
being. A person suffering from TB would obviously display symptoms of depression caused by the
progressive ravages of the disease within the body. All of this would have been unknown to the
people of Kafka’s era.

On the 2nd of October, 1911 we read the following about his inability to sleep and its consequent
depression of his spirits: “Sleepless night. The third in a row... I feel myself rejected by sleep...
Towards morning I sigh into my pillow, because for this night all hope is gone.” 9 One can note so
easily the desperation in these words. The diary entry from the 15th of November 1911 is worth
quoting in full here as it sums up so succinctly, movingly and aptly how a person who suffers from
real depression actually feels. It is a passage also that quintessentially contains the feelings of angst
and nausea expressed in the works of all existentialist writers. As well as that, it allows us an
insight into another quality of existentialist writing, namely, that of the alienation of the individual

8
Ibid., p. 392.
9
Diaries, p 60.
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from others and even from himself. In the following passage, we note all these things mentioned
above as well as the feelings of fear, anxiety, desiring to hide oneself away from the world, self-
doubt, self-criticism, self-loathing, sheer dissatisfaction with one’s own body, physical pain, mental
pain, perhaps even a sense of panic, and an overarching sense of the waste of time involved in, and
the sheer meaninglessness of, the whole human enterprise:
Yesterday evening, already with a sense of foreboding, pulled the cover off
the bed, lay down, and again became aware of all my abilities as though I
was holding them in my hand; they tightened my chest, they set my head on
fire, for a short while, to console myself for not getting up to work, I
repeated: “that’s not healthy, that’s not healthy,” and with almost visible
purpose tried to draw sleep over my head. I kept thinking of a cap with a
visor which, to protect myself, I pulled down hard over my forehead. How
much did I lose yesterday, how the blood pounded in my tight head, capable
of anything and restrained only by powers which are indispensable for my
very life and are here being wasted. 10

It would be tedious in the extreme, and make very distressing reading, to continue citing
instances of Kafka’s depression and near desperation in these diaries. Suffice it to say that
references to such feelings abound.11

3. Thoughts of Suicide and Suicide Ideation

In a very general sense, some of the early modernist writers, and many of the late nineteenth
century Russian authors for sure, contemplated suicide more as a philosophical option or answer to
a life considered meaningless in the final analysis, rather than a deep existential need on the part of
the suicide to escape severe mental suffering and pain. In reading these Diaries one becomes
convinced very soon that Kafka’s discussion of this question, while at times it borders on the
former is more decidedly motivated by the latter experience. In an entry from the 25th of December
in 1911, he writes of his great-grandmother on his mother’s side who threw herself in the Elbe after
her daughter, Kafka’s grandmother, died all too young from typhus. Then, suddenly our author
crafts a sentence replete with suicide ideation: “To run against the window and, weak after exerting
12
all one’s strength, to step over the window sill through the splintered wood and glass.” Further,
th
an entry from the 8 of March 1912 is as specific: “Day before yesterday was blamed because of
13
the factory. Then for an hour on the sofa thought about jumping-out-the-window.” The use of
hyphenation here, I’d imagine, makes of the four words one very definite conception of the action.
On the 15th of August 1913 he mentions exactly the same thought. Then, on February, 15th, 1914,

10
Ibid., p. 118.
11
See Diaries, pp. 410 – 412 and 417 for other references to depression, and pp. 10, 221, 224, 318 and 383 for further references to despair.
12
Ibid., p. 153.
13
Ibid., p. 191.
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he tells us that he has spent many sleepless nights and that he is experiencing “sorrow after
14
sorrow.” Kafka’s description here is resoundingly similar to that of Professor Lewis Wolpert, a
modern author and scientist, who describes his experience of depression as being that of an abiding
feeling of “malignant sadness,” that is, a sadness that will not go away and will eventually eat one
away.15

4. Kafka’s Thoughts on the Writer’s Craft

For Kafka, as I have outlined, his notebooks served many purposes, and so it would be remiss in
the extreme not to discuss in some detail their function as a writer’s commonplace or workbook.
Without a doubt, Kafka, again and again in these diary entries, equates his ability/inability to write
with his parallel feelings of meaning/meaninglessness. In an undated entry from 1910 he sums up
his then thoughts on writing:
My condition is not unhappiness, but it is also not happiness, not
indifference, not weakness, not fatigue, not another interest – so, what is it
then? That I do not know this is probably connected with my inability to
write. And, without knowing the reason for it, I believe I understand the
latter. 16

Further, as regards the proportions of the quantity versus the quality of his creative efforts, on the
17th of December 1910, he writes:
That I have put aside and crossed out so much, indeed almost everything I
wrote this year, that hinders me a great deal in writing. It is indeed a
mountain, it is five times as much as I have in general ever written, and by
its mass alone it draws everything that I write away from under my pen to
itself. 17

However or wherever we read Kafka’s Diaries we can only marvel at the fact that he is
18
authentic, or as those involved in therapy put it these days, he is “congruent” to a fault. He
honestly shares on the page his innermost feelings of depression and despair, his ruthless honesty
about all his feelings about himself and others, and, above all, his struggle to make his life
somehow bearable, liveable and essentially meaningful. His is a modern crisis, or an existential
crisis, or if you like, the crisis of seeking out one’s identity as a person and as a writer in the early
twentieth century. The following passage to my mind sums up this quest, very much a binary quest

14
Ibid., p. 259
15
See ibid., p. 259 and also Lewis Wolpert (1999) passim.
16
Ibid., p. 12
17
Ibid., p. 30
18
Brod felt that two of Kafka's most distinguishing traits were "absolute truthfulness" (absolute Wahrhaftigkeit) and "precise conscientiousness"
(präzise Gewissenhaftigkeit). See Brod Max (1960). Franz Kafka: A Biography. New York: Schocken Books, p.47, and Brod, Max (1966). Über
Franz Kafka (in German). Hamburg: S. Fischer Verlag, p. 49.
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with respect to Kafka, that is, that his personal quest for meaning is inextricably bound up with his
quest to be a good writer:

Wretched, wretched, and yet with good intentions. It is midnight, but since
I have slept very well, this is an excuse only to the extent that by day I
would have written nothing. The burning electric light, the silent house, the
darkness outside, the last waking moments, they give me the right to write
even if it be only the most miserable stuff. And the right I use hurriedly.
That’s the person I am. 19
In short, Kafka is declaring that his writing is him, or vice versa that he is his writing. In terms of
one’s identity, I’m sure all artists feel that there is a similar intense relationship between their art
and their own very selfhood.

Those of us who know no German can only read Kafka in translation. By all accounts he was
undoubtedly an accomplished and adept writer in that language. Even though he lived in Prague
and knew the Czech language, German was the language he used both at home and at school and
chose to write in. Again and again, even though he was acknowledged for his ability to write by his
friends and literary colleagues, he voices doubt about this apparent ability, as he writes on 19th of
November, 1911: “This evening I was again filled with anxiously restrained abilities.” 20

One could fill these pages with many of Kafka’s thoughts on writing, but as with his reflections
on depression and despair, one would either bore or annoy the reader intolerably as well as adding
nothing of real substance to the points one wishes to stress. Therefore, I will finish with one very
short quotation by way of summary here. It comes from the 31st of July 1914 when two friends of
his have just been called up to join the army. Undoubtedly, such events as the First World War with
friends joining up, while he could not do so himself on health grounds would have added to his
feelings of isolation, yet he knew that the key to his survival lay in his writing: “But I will write in
spite of everything, absolutely; it is my struggle for self-preservation.” 21

5. The Abiding Feeling of Anxiety

Most, if not all, writers and philosophers who belong to that wonderfully amorphous and almost
too all-embracing category called “existentialism” subscribe to the fact that one of the major
descriptors of modern and post-modern humankind is the overwhelming feeling of anxiety. Rollo
May and Irvin Yalom, both of whom belong to that group of therapists loosely described as
existential, write of anxiety’s being one of the main symptoms their clients present with in therapy.

19
Ibid., p. 33
20
Ibid., p. 122
21
Ibid., p. 300
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When we read Kafka, whether it is his Diaries, the subject of this short essay, or his more creative
works, an overwhelming feeling of anxiety is practically always easily discernible. 22 There are
countless references to his anxiety in the Diaries and I will refer to some of those here. On the 8th of
December 1911, Kafka wrote:

I have now, and have had since this afternoon, a great yearning to write all
my anxiety entirely out of me, write it into the depths of the paper just as it
comes out of the depths of me, or write it in such a way that I could draw
what I had written into me completely. This is no artistic yearning. Today,
when Löwy spoke of his dissatisfaction with and his indifference to
everything that the troupe does, I explained his condition as due to his
feeling of homesickness, but in a sense did not give him this explanation
even though I voiced it, instead kept it for myself and enjoyed it in passing
as a sorrow of my own.23
Obviously, attending the doctor was not something to which Kafka looked forward to as is
evidenced in the following quotation concerning anxiety. In it he reveals his contempt for his body
and his adulation for the life of his mind (or spirit) which he seeks to liberate from its loathsome
physical home, which he visualises as being cut the pieces in this effort of liberation. One notes
here a certain biblical or religious contempt for the physical body and an exaltation of the attributes
of the mind or the spirit. Like most of the entries in these Diaries we encounter an intensely
profound and much troubled thinker, whose thoughts and feelings and insights overlap, mostly
supporting one another, but at other times, fewer in number, they contradict one another – factors
that add to their complexity. Reading Kafka is always an encounter with complexity and
profundity and we should expect no less. On the 21st of June, 1913, he writes:

The anxiety I suffer from all sides. The examination by the doctor, the way
he presses against me, I virtually empty myself out and he makes speeches
into me, despised and unrefuted. The tremendous world I have in my head.
But how free myself and free it without being torn to pieces. And a
thousand times rather be torn to pieces than retain it in me or bury it. That,
indeed, is why I am here, that is quite clear to me. 24

This leads us neatly on to our next point: Kafka’s dissatisfaction with and contempt for his body.

22
Apart from the quotations mentioned under this heading we can find entries about anxiety right through the Diaries. The following pages all reveal
interesting insights into Kafka’s abiding feeling of anxiety: Diaries, pp. 352, 353, 362, 364, 390, 413, 417, 418 and 421.
23
Ibid., p. 134
24
Ibid., p. 222
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6. Contempt for the Physical Body

I have stated above that reading Kafka is always an encounter with complexity and profundity
and that we should expect no less. I will describe here Kafka’s apparent contempt for his physical
body, but hasten to point out that our revered author was quite an accomplished sportsman when we
compare him to the general run of the mill person – being a good swimmer and diver, a tolerably
good horseman and a lover of the outdoor life when on holidays. He even delighted in going, on at
least one occasion, to a nudist colony. He also loved to dress extremely well as is evidenced by the
many photographs of him that are available to us. On the surface, none of this shows the slightest
contempt for the body. However, under this surface lurked a seemingly unhappy man with low
self-esteem. No doubt, too, contempt for the body often springs from an underlying acceptance,
either conscious or unconscious, of a position of Cartesian dualism where the body is a mere
vehicle for, or a container of, the higher spirit or soul or mind.

I have already referred to Kafka’s being a seriously ill person for most of his life insofar as he
suffered from what was then called consumption and what we now call the highly contagious
disease of tuberculosis. That this might have had a significant influence on both his attitude to his
body and his mental health would seem to be incontrovertible. In an undated diary entry from 1910
Kafka declares: “I write this very decidedly out of despair over my body and over a future with this
body.” He goes on then to write about that feeling of despair as being inextricably “tied to its
object.”25 One cannot but see a direct link between these feelings of contempt for his body and his
illness with his being subject to hypochondria which is obvious in the following quotation from
some thoughts jotted down in his diary from the 9th of October 1911:

I’ll hardly reach my fortieth birthday, however; the frequent tension over
the left of my skull, for example, speaks against it – it feels like an inner
leprosy which, when I only observe it and disregard its unpleasantness,
makes the same impression on me as the skull cross-section in textbooks, or
as an almost painless dissection of the living body where the knife – a little
coolingly, carefully, often stopping and going back, sometimes lying still –
splits still thinner the paper-thin integument close to the functioning parts of
the brain.26
Again, on the 21st November, 1911, Kafka wrote the following, which is partly creative and, one
suspects, almost wholly true: “Now, however, I lie here on the sofa, kicked out of the world,
watching for the sleep that refuses to come and will only graze me when it does, my joints ache
with fatigue, my dried-up body trembles towards its own destruction in turmoils of which I dare not

25
Ibid., p.10.
26
Ibid., pp. 70 – 71.
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become fully conscious, in my head are astonishing convulsions...” 27 On the 24th of the same
month he describes his body as being one which “was picked up in a lumber room.” 28 As regards
his health in general, he remarks some 11 years later on the 9th of March 1922, just about one year
before he died from T.B., almost in a cry of pain and desperation:

In the past, when I had a pain and it passed away, I was happy; now I am
merely relieved, while there is a bitter feeling in me: ‘Only to be well again,
nothing more.’ 29
7. Alienation

There is another common term used when referring to writers with an existentialist bent, and that
is alienation which may be defined as that sense of being cut off from society, from family, from
others and indeed from one’s true self. Another term we could possibly use here would be the
over-riding feeling of isolation. Or, better terms again would be “estrangement” and the feeling of
being an outsider. As early as the 19th of February, 1911 Kafka writes that his office work alienates
him from his true task as a writer, from his true or real self. 30

In the final analysis, I know, that is just talk, the fault is mine and the office
has the right to make the most definite and justified demands on me. But
for me in particular it is a horrible double life from which there is no escape
but insanity.31
In a later entry from the 20th of August 1913 he writes that he is “alienated in general from the
whole of everything good, and don’t even believe it yet” and this in the context of his creative
writing and his meeting Miss Félice Bauer for the first time.

With regards to his feeling like an outsider to his family, he reports a conversation with his
mother that went along these lines: “‘So nobody understands you,’ my mother said, ‘I suppose I am
a stranger to you too, and your father as well. So we all want only what is bad for you.’ ‘Certainly,
you are strangers to me, we are related only by blood, but that never shows itself. Of course, you
32
don’t want what is bad for me.’” One can only marvel at the honesty and authenticity of feeling
in this conversation with his mother – any psychotherapist worth their salt would agree.

27
Ibid., p. 124
28
Ibid., p. 126.
29
Ibid., p. 416.
30
These terms “true” or “real” self, of course, Kafka would never have used as they are from the work of modern mainline psychotherapy, especially
that of Carl Ransom Rogers.
31
Diaries, p. 38. The feeling of being pulled in several directions at once, of being what Kafka here describes as being “a double” is also linked with
the crisis of identity which we will discuss under another heading shortly.
32
Ibid., p 229.
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A day later, on the 21st of August, 1913 he continues, in a draft of a letter to the father of Félice
Bauer, his fiancée, and writes words that certainly sum up his estrangement or alienation from his
own family. This section is, again, worth quoting in full:

Well, I live in a family, among the best and most lovable people, more
strange (sic) than a stranger. I have not spoken an average of twenty words
a day to my mother these last years, hardly ever said more than hello to my
father. I do not speak at all to my married sisters and my brothers-in-law,
and not because I have anything against them. The reason for it is simply
this, that I have not the slightest thing to talk to them about. Everything that
is not literature bores me and I hate it... I lack all aptitude for family life
except, at best, as an observer. I have no family feeling and visitors make
me almost feel as though I were maliciously being attacked.33
One could have no doubt as to Kafka’s existentialist bent in these diaries and in his books in
general, given these accounts of his experiences, and further that he quotes Kierkegaard in the
context of the above quotation and how he states clearly that he truly could identify with the
thoughts and feelings of this nineteenth century Danish philosopher and divine. 34

8. The Question of Identity or the Quest for the Elusive Self

This is probably the most fundamental issue of our existence. “Who am I?” or “Who are we
humans?” are questions that have preoccupied humankind ever since the dawn of consciousness.
They are age-old questions for sure, but they were raised with a new and alarming intensity at the
dawn of modernity from the late nineteenth century onwards. Needless to say, such an intense,
introspective and profound and serious a thinker like Kafka would become obsessed with it, too.
Early in these Diaries, Kafka harshly criticises his formal education on at least three occasions for
its sheer inadequacy and for its failure to help him grow as a human being. In an undated entry
from 1910 he states his case succinctly and pointedly with no little bitterness, in a statement which
serves as a salutary warning to all educators and teachers everywhere, that he:

...can prove at any time that my education tried to make another person out
of me than the one I became. It is for the harm, therefore, that my educators
could have done me in according with their intentions that I approach them;
I demand from their hands the person I now am, and since they cannot give
him to me, I make of my reproach and laughter a drum beat sounding into
the world beyond... the reproach for having after all spoiled a part of me –
for having spoiled a good, beautiful part... 35

33
Ibid., p. 231
34
See Diaries, p. 230 where he states that he has just bought an anthology of Kierkegaard’s writings and declares that “he bears me out like a
friend.”
35
Ibid., pp. 17-18
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At around the same time in world history, a distinctive and erudite Irish educationalist, Patrick
H. Pearse proposed that the aim of any education system should be the formations of any child’s
36
“best self.” This was a strikingly modern aim, one that could almost have New-Age-like
connotations if one didn’t know better, but at the same time, this was rather a prescient and child-
centred aim to be proposing so early in the twentieth century. Reading Kafka’s Diaries here, one
could be in no doubt that the brilliant Czech author would agree with the Irish educationalist.

Less than a year later on the sixteenth of October, 1911, our Prague author muses about who he
is exactly and really cannot come up with any definition. Instead, in a piece of modernist, indeed
existentialist, writing he captures his utter confusion in the face of a very absurd world:

Up and down in Mr H’s yard, a dog puts his paw on the tip of my foot
which I shake. Children, chickens, here and there adults. A children’s
nurse, occasionally leaning on the railing of the Pawlatsche [balcony] or
hiding behind a door, her eye on me. Under her eyes I do not know just
what I am, whether indifferent, embarrassed, young or old, impudent or
devoted, holding my hands behind or before me, animal lover or man of
affairs, friend of H. or supplicant, superior to those gathered at the meeting
who sometimes go from the tavern to the pissoir and back in an unbroken
line, or ridiculous to them because of my thin clothes, Jew or Christian
etc..37
One could be reading Joyce or Beckett here as this piece is so modernist in style and tone. All
the while he is observing things and simply cannot figure out where he as a “self” fits in. To
describe what is happening here in more psychotherapeutic terms, one could possibly propose that
our author is experiencing a fractured view of himself where no one possible image of self satisfies
him at all. There are so many possible selves available to him that Kafka is quite at a loss as to
which to decide upon. Therefore, fracture and fragmentation rule with respect to his identity rather
than any kind of integration or wholeness. In short, it is my contention that any kind of integrated or
whole idea of self was to forever elude Kafka.38

One also intuits a Camus-like sense of absurdity, though more humorously described in a slap-
stick comedic fashion, in the following piece on the meaninglessness of life and his absurd
existence that he wrote on the 21st of July 1913:

36
P.H.Pearse, one of modern Ireland’s founding fathers wrote the following in a pamphlet on education, often called The Murder Machine: (January,
1916) that “...the main object in education is to help the child to be his own true and best self. What the teacher should bring to his pupil is not a set of
ready-made opinions or a stock of cut-and-dried information, but an inspiration and an example; and his main qualification should be, not such an
overmastering will as shall impose itself at all hazards upon all weaker wills that come under its influence, but rather so infectious an enthusiasm as
shall kindle new enthusiasm.” Page VII of The Murder Machine, available on line here: http://www.cym.ie/documents/themurdermachine.pdf
37
Diaries, p. 79
38
It is to this struggle, engaged in by Kafka, that a client’s attention can be drawn, or indeed the attention of anyone interested in self-development,
with the proviso that to be in any way satisfied with our lives that we must attempt such a personal integration.
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To be pulled up through the ground-floor window of a house by a rope tied

around one’s neck, and to be yanked up, bloody and ragged, through all the
ceilings, furniture, walls and attics, without consideration, as if by a person
who is paying no attention, until the empty noose, dropping the last
fragments of me when it breaks through the roof tiles, is seen on the roof. 39
There are so many references in Kafka’s Diaries to his fragmented and unsteady sense of self or
of unsure and fleeting personal identity that in the end, the best advice to give anyone studying that
topic would be to go and read the actual book and engage with the author first hand as it were.
However, in the final analysis, the greatest identity he does make is that he is his writing and his
writing is he. Therefore, I will finish this subsection with a relevant quotation bearing this
identification in mind. Once again, this piece is quoted from the letter he wrote to the father of his
then fiancée Félice Bauer, and to which we have already referred above with respect to his sense of
alienation from the world 40:

My job is unbearable to me because it conflicts with my only desire and my

only calling, which is literature. Since I am nothing but literature, and can
and want to be nothing else, my job will never take possession of me, it
may, however, shatter me completely, and this is by no means a remote
possibility. 41

9. The World of Dreams, the Unconscious and the Surreal

For anyone au fait with the development or evolution of literature over roughly the past two
millennia of civilised society, it would be no surprise to learn that the world of dreams would
always have been recognised as an area of potential inspiration for artistic endeavour. In my
heading here, I am very roughly, and indeed very loosely, associating that world of dreams with the
whole area of the mind or indeed of our collective minds (in other words, our culture) called the
unconscious, and further linking it with that general movement in art, in its broadest sense, called
surrealism. In short, what I am highlighting here is the fact that Sigmund Freud did not suddenly
discover the unconscious out of the blue as many people too often assume, but rather that it was he
who brought it to the attention of the public in a more formalised way than heretofore. It was he
who pointed out that human beings make their decisions and take their choices based not alone on
their rational faculties but also on their unconscious, non-rational and often irrational, motivations.
In short, Freud did for our understanding of the mind what the likes of Einstein and Bohr did for
our knowledge of atomic and subatomic particles.

39
Ibid., p. 224
40
See the section of this essay on alienation and the relevant quotation from this letter of 21st August 1913, Diaries, p. 231.
41
Ibid., p. 230
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To return to Kafka here, it is no understatement to declare that his Diaries are filled with
accounts of his dreams. For any creative writer, this would be no great surprise whatsoever. It
also, of course, helps us to appreciate much of his creative writing, many stories of which are
replete with images and transforming or changing images that come straight from the world of his
dreams. In this sense, then, many of his stories are chock-full of surreal images – images that
change their form all too readily and all too easily. In this regard, a visit to the Franz Kafka
42
Museum in Prague is no little help to anyone who would be a devotee of Kafka’s work as that
multidisciplinary experience uses media that shift our very senses of the world. It opens with
newsreel from the time of Kafka but those images are made to shift and shimmer. There is also a
room whose walls are clad with facing mirrors that reflect and distort and re-reflect and re-distort
our images of reality. In other words, the museum captures very much the dreamlike images from
Kafka’s surreal imagination. One gets the feeling as one visits this wonderful little museum that
literally the ground is moving from under your feet. In that exhibition, we are confronted with the
world as Kafka saw it: his family context, his familial and relationship entanglements, his social
and cultural context and indeed the mood of Prague in the early twentieth century and all of this is
shown to us through a lens that distorts our sensibilities. When this present writer first read Kafka,
the abiding questions he was left with were: “What is the real world?” “What is reality anyway?”
“Do I construct it?” “Do I see it as it actually is at all?” “Is my mind the only reality?” Is my
imagination as real as things out there in the world? And these were some of the questions that
interested me when I was reading philosophy at university. Metaphysics can rear its head, as all
areas of philosophy can, in extraordinary, and often more effective and meaningful ways, in
literature rather than in the more cerebral ways of the pure field of philosophy qua philosophy. Let
us now turn our attention back to Kafka’s Diaries and see what insights we may catch from his
written accounts of his dreams.

As early as October 2nd, 1911 here is an account of one of Franz Kafka’s dreams, and I have
chosen this example to show the reader how such dreams might be used effectively in literature to
create a surreal effect. Knowing that our author kept accounts of his dreams is very useful to the
reader of any of Kafka’s works. In other words, such accounts, as the one below, enable us to let
the dream world be and help us to desist from asking meaningless questions as to what X or Y or Z
might mean.

At the heart of Kafka’s literary, and real, world was Prague – and it is to Kafka and Prague that the exhibition in the Hergertova cihelna (Franz
42

Kafka Museum) in the Lesser Quarter, in the heart of Kafka’s native city, is devoted.
15 | P a g e

The horrible apparition last night of a blind child, apparently the daughter of
my aunt in Leitmeritz who, however, has no daughter but only sons, one of
whom once broke his leg. On the other hand there were resemblances
between the child and Dr M’s daughter, who as I have recently seen, is in
the process of changing from a pretty child into a stout, stiffly dressed little
girl. This blind or weak-sighted child had both eyes covered by a pair of
glasses, the left, under a lens held a certain distance from the eye, was
milky-grey and bulbous, the other receded and was covered by a lens lying
close against it. In order that this eyeglass might be set in place with optical
correctness it was necessary, instead of the usual support going behind the
ears, to make use of a lever, the head of which could be attached to no place
but the cheek bone, so that from this lens a little rod descended to the cheek,
there disappeared into the pierced flesh and ended on the bone, while
another small wire came out and went back over the ear. 43
Other dreams depict equally surreal images. We will, of course, engage in no profound or even
superficial analysis of any of these dreams as this present writer is neither qualified nor overly
knowledgeable in that area. Also, I firmly believe, along Jungian lines, that only the dreamer,
sometimes with the help of another, -- whether therapist or not -- is in a position to say what any
dream might mean or imply in the first place. However, we can at least assert that we can notice
certain factors that crop up again and again in his writings as being disturbing issues we find in his
dreams, like his relationship with his father of which he writes much in his Diaries and other places
anyway. Therefore, I will finish this subsection with an account of a brief nightmare he had about
his father where he dreams he was holding him on the sloping edge of the windowsill by the
shoulders of his dressing gown, but his father was so heavy he was in danger of pulling his son out
too. I offer no interpretation of this wee surreal snippet, but rather ask the reader to read the stories
of Kafka, and he or she will understand how such images could be employed by the author to fill
out his stories. As a modernist writer, Kafka offers no explanation. Not for him, the more rigid
moral stance of any omniscient narrator. In the Kafka world, all things are far more fluid, even the
field of morality. In this sense, Kafka had answered the modernist call to “make it new,” and very
new, at that, from very early in the twentieth century. The old certainties could never satisfy the
modern person come of age after the horrors of World War 1. Uncertainty was now firmly at the
centre of the modern world view or weltanschauung.

10. Failure, Fracture and Fragmentation

Ten is a rather arbitrary number, but for the sake of some sort of idea of completion to this short
essay, I thought I should finish on such a tidy number of points, bearing in mind how untidy and
complex is the experience of engaging with an author as intricate and as intense as Kafka. From the
43
Diaries, pp. 60-61.
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beginning, our author is his own harshest critic. He is extremely self-judgmental in these diaries,
and most of that criticism hinges on his failure to write, either at all, or at least up to the quality he
desires. However, there were other failures, of course, that bedevilled him – his failure to connect
with his family, with others, and most especially with several fiancées over the course of his life.
While on the one hand, Kafka was initially totally besotted by Félice Bauer (his first fiancée) his
relationship with her was often strained and conflicted as he writes on the 13th September, 1914:
“The thoughts provoked in me by the war resemble my old worries over F. in the tormenting way in
which they devour me in every direction. I can’t endure worry, and perhaps have been created
44
expressly in order to die of it...” As regards his failure to relate to his family see the point on
alienation above. However, his failure to connect with others, and a counsellor or therapist would
add his failure to connect with himself, underlies all his problems with respect to relationships. On
the 29th of January 1922, just two years before the ravages of TB would claim him for the grave,
Kafka would write the following sad and desperately moving words that are worth quoting
somewhat more fully as they capture so well the writer’s existential plight and angst:

Suffered some attacks on the road [coughing, breathing problems] through

the snow in the evening. There are conflicting thoughts always in my head,
something like this: My situation in this world would seem to be a dreadful
one, alone here in Spindelmühle, on a forsaken road, moreover where one
keeps slipping in the snow in the dark, senseless road, moreover, without an
earthly goal (to the bridge? Why there? Besides I didn’t even go that far); I
too forsaken in this place (I cannot place a human, personal value on the
help the doctor gives me, I haven’t earned it; at bottom the fee is my only
relationship to him), incapable of striking up a relationship with anyone,
incapable of tolerating a friendship, at bottom full of endless astonishment
when I see a group of people cheerfully assembled together...45
At bottom, I suppose one has to admit that any individual’s life in the end is a failure in the
broadest sense of the term as we all die, and yet one suspects that Kafka especially experienced his
mortality through being so physically ill throughout his life. Undoubtedly, too, being so physically
ill has mental health consequences and pre-disposes one to depression and despair, and this is
abundantly clear from Kafka’s thoughts expressed here in his Diaries. In short, our author recounts
often his experiences of failure, fracture and fragmentation in these intense diary entries, as literally
his world begins to crumble away. And yet, from a bird’s eye view or a God’s eye perspective or
even from an objective scientific observational point of view (all are metaphors here, I hasten to

44
Ibid., p. 314
45
Ibid., p. 408 Spindelmühle is a town in the Czech Republic . It received its name (which can be literally translated as Špindler's Mill) after a mill
belonging to the Spindler family, where neighbours would meet. The town is one of the most well-known and most frequented mountain or ski
resorts in the Czech Republic. Judging from his comments in this entry with regards to the medical doctor, it is most likely that Kafka was visiting
there for health reasons as the mountain air was thought to be good for TB. He does, too, mention in previous entries that he went tobogganing and
for several sleigh rides while in this resort.
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add) this would seem to be the way with life, that it does leak away and crumble to dust despite
even our best efforts to prevent it from doing so. This is what makes Kafka essentially an
existentialist – a writer who is able to capture the actual experience of living in all its order and
disorder, in all its ugly fever and in all its fragile beauty. To finish this point, and indeed these
reflections as a whole, this present writer was not a little moved by this rather philosophical and
wise observation from his pen on the 20th of February 1922: “Unnoticeable life. Noticeable
failure.”46 And yet, irony of ironies, reading Kafka does allow us to begin to notice life, as Kafka
was a great noticer of life, a wonderful observer of little things that can move our hearts. The pity
was that he was a pitiless self-critic who noticed his failures far too much and his successes far too
little.

End

46
Ibid., p. 414.
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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Brod M. (1960) Franz Kafka: A Biography. New York: Schocken Books

Gray, R.T., Gross, R.V., Goebel, R.J. & Koelb, C. (eds.) (2005) A Franz Kafka Encyclopedia.
Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.
Kafka, F. (1976) Diaries 1910 – 1923, ed. Max Brod., New York: Schocken Books.
Pearse, P.H. (1916) The Murder Machine. Online PDF version of the original pamphlet/book
available here: http://www.cym.ie/documents/themurdermachine.pdf, accessed 14 July, 2016.
Rogers, C.R. and Stevens, B. (eds.) (1975) Person to Person: The Problem of being Human. New
York: Pocket Books.
Rogers, C.R. (1995) A Way of Being. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin.
Rogers, C.R. (1999) On Becoming a Person: a therapist’s view of psychotherapy. London:
Constable & Company.
Rogers, C.R. (2003) Client-Centered Therapy. London: Constable & Robinson Ltd.
Wolpert, L. (1999) Malignant Sadness: The Anatomy of Depression. London: Faber & Faber.