Why has a new British book about Kafka and pornography evoked such strong negative reactions in Germany? Germans have not so far accepted the claims made by James Hawes in Excavating Kafka that the legendary writer had a hardcore porn collection. The larger picture Hawes paints, of a worldly Kafka who was concerned, above all, with his own sexual and literary advantage, has also met with displeasure. To some extent, this row over Kafka is one prompted by fundamentally different national taboos.

In Germany, where attitudes towards sexuality have long been laxer, the expressionist drawings in the literary magazine the Amethyst, to which Kafka subscribed, just don’t qualify as “porn”... Kafka expert Reiner Stach deemed the charge a “marketing ploy”. It must be said that there are British writers who have held Kafka in higher estimation... W.H. Auden, for example, who moved to Weimar Berlin in 1928 to be with his lover Christopher Isherwood and escape Britain’s prudery. Auden considered Kafka a witness of the times as Dante and Shakespeare were to theirs. [Kafka] based the figure of Joseph K in The Trial on Freud’s most brilliant student, Otto Gross, who coined the phrase “sexual revolution”, and whose own father had him arrested. [That] revolution was an international one. Gross was the lover of Frieda von Richthofen, the future wife of D.H. Lawrence. He was also once accused of pornography, but in fact like Kafka, was mainly concerned with freeing the human spirit. Beyond the charges of pornography, the unremittingly negative portrayal of Kafka in Excavating Kafka, as a kind of literary philistine, must encounter resistance in Germany. [The book] makes a strenuous effort [to] urge readers to rigorously ignore the events of the Holocaust in order to understand Kafka’s work.

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