The Icarian

Books That Killed Their Authors: Franz Kafka
A Hunger Artist

“A first sign of the beginning of understanding is the wish to die.” — Franz Kafka

People once paid to see someone starving to death.

Lithograph by Moriz Jung, 1907, “Variety Act 3- 132nd Day of Fasting, A. Lucci the Famous Hunger Artist”

Hunger artists, also called starvation artists, were performers in Europe and America in the 17th through the early 20th centuries who publicly starved themselves for paying audiences – what could be considered an early form of performance art. Hunger artists were almost always men. Traveling from city to city they performed widely advertised public fasts lasting as long as 40 days for paying audiences. A few hunger artists claimed they fasted for more than 130 days.

During the late 19th and early 20th century there were the separate phenomenon of “Fasting Girls” – usually young women who refused to eat while claiming miraculous powers – and ultra-thin people called “Living Skeletons” who performed in carnival side shows. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fasting_girl

One hundred years ago, insurance company lawyer and writer Franz Kafka starved to death in a decidedly less public and quite horrific manner.

Franz Kafka, 1923 Public Domain

Kafka was diagnosed with tuberculosis in August 1917. His already fragile health began a long decline as he struggled to write, work and navigate his romantic relationships.

By March 1924, Kafka had a fever and severe bouts of coughing.

He returned to his home town of Prague from Berlin where he had been living with his most recent girlfriend Dora Diamant. In Prague his sister Ottla and Diamant cared for him until 10 April, when he checked into a sanitarium outside Vienna, Austria. Kafka’s tubercular larynx swelled. Swallowing became painful and difficult. Eating became impossible. Parenteral nutrition, or intravenous feeding, wouldn’t be developed until the mid-1960s.

On 3 June 1924, Kafka died in the Austrian sanitarium of starvation in Dora Diamant’s arms. He was 40. His body was brought back to Prague and he was buried on 11 June 1924, in the New Jewish Cemetery.

At the time of his death Kafka was editing his short story “A Hunger Artist” as the title piece for a story collection published shortly after his death. Originally published in 1922, “A Hunger Artist” tells the first person story of a hunger artist lamenting that the public’s entertainment tastes changed and public starvation was no longer popular.

Kafka’s last short story, “Josephine the Singer; or, The Mouse Folk”, was included in the collection “A Hunger Artist”. Like “A Hunger Artist”, “Josephine the Singer” deals with the relationship between an artist and their audience.

The fact that Kafka was editing a short story about a man who purposely starves himself while he was starving to death might be considered both ironic and somewhat Kafkaesque. Kafka’s writing is powerful enough that it spawned the adjective Kafkaesque. The term Kafkaesque has transcended beyond the description of a literary style to mean any situation that is incomprehensibly complex, bizarre, or illogical.

While Kafka was not a best-selling author during his lifetime, he wasn’t completely unknown. He did have several stories, all written in German, published between 1908 and early 1924.

Max Brod, 1914

As tuberculosis slowly strangled Kafka he was determined to destroy his considerable body of unpublished written work, his drawings (Kafka was also an artist) and other writings such as diaries and letters. Kafka left his work, published and unpublished, to his friend and literary executor Max Brod, who was himself a prolific writer and composer.

Kafka : “Dearest Max, my last request: Everything I leave behind me … in the way of diaries, manuscripts, letters (my own and others’), sketches, and so on, [is] to be burned unread.”

Kafka had already burned some of his papers with Diamant’s help.

Brod ignored Kafka’s incendiary request. “I shall not carry out your wishes,” Brod said he told Kafka.

Instead, he published the novels his novels “The Trial”, “The Castle”, and “Amerika”, and collected works between 1925 and 1935.

“Franz should have appointed another executor if he had been absolutely determined that his instructions should stand,” Brod said.

Thanks to Brod’s insubordination Kafka is recognized as one of the 20th century’s major literary figures. His writings became influential in the years after World War II, first in German-speaking Europe and then worldwide in the 1960s with translations into English. His works, despite being written more than 100 years ago, reflect the alienation and frustration of modern life. They are perhaps more relevant today than when they were published.

Max Brod, 1965

Brod took Kafka’s papers – unpublished notes, diaries, and sketches – with him when he fled to Palestine in 1939. Brod died in Tel Aviv, Israel, 20 December 1968 at age 84.

When Broad died the collection of Kafka materials went to Esther Hoffe, who had been Broad’s secretary and possible mistress. Hoffe kept most of papers until she died in 2007 and passed the archives to her daughters, Eva and Ruth. Hoffe apparently profited by selling an original manuscript of “The Trial” in 1988 for $2 million to the German Literary Archive Museum of Modern Literature.

After Esther Hoffe died, a court battle over the papers took place between Hoffe’s daughters and the National Library of Israel, which argued that Brod’s will meant to have the papers donated to the institution. Esther’s daughters argued the papers should be theirs.

A Tel Aviv Family Court ruled in October 2012 the papers were the property of the National Library. In December 2016 the Israeli Supreme Court upheld the Tel Aviv Family Court decision.

Dora Diamant, Kafka’s last lover, also ignored his wishes. Diamant secretly kept about 20 notebooks and 35 letters that were confiscated by the Gestapo in 1933 when her Berlin apartment was searched. These works remain missing but some scholars believe they may still exist.

The Kafka Project, a non-profit literary research initiative founded in 1998 at San Diego State University working with the Kafka estate in London, England, is working to recover materials written by Kafka stolen by the Gestapo in 1933. The search for the documents continues in Eastern Europe and Israel.

Aside from his writings and drawings, only one physical object belonging to Kafka is know to exist: his hair brush.

Hunger Artists and Starving Girls were proven frauds.

Sources:
GOOLDIN, S. (2003). Fasting Women, Living Skeletons and Hunger Artists: Spectacles of Body and Miracles at the Turn of a Century. Body & Society, 9(2), 27-53. https://doi.org/10.1177/1357034X030092002

Vandereycken, Walter and Ron Van Deth (1996). From Fasting Saints to Anorexic Girls: The History of Self-Starvation. New York University Press. pp. 81–95.

Hunger Artists “Fasting Wonders” Article by Ruben de Somer
http://www.sideshowworld.com/13-TGOD/2014/Hunger/Artists.html

Israel’s National Library adds a final twist to Franz Kafka’s Trial
German museum asked to hand back author’s disputed manuscript to correct ‘historical error’
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/oct/25/israel-library-franz-kafka-trial

What It Really Means to Be ‘Kafkaesque’
Author Ben Marcus says the beautiful but sorrowful strangeness of Kafka’s “A Message from the Emperor” make it a perfect piece of writing. By Joe Fassler
https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2014/01/what-it-really-means-to-be-kafkaesque/283096/

Trove of Kafka’s drawings reveals his ‘cheerful side’
https://www.futurity.org/franz-kafka-drawings-2671862-2/

Diamant, Kathi, Kafka’s Last Love: The Mystery of Dora Diamant, p. 132.

Butler, Judith (3 March 2011). “Who Owns Kafka”. London Review of Books. 33 (5). London. Archived from the original on 3 December 2019.

The Kafka Project
https://kafka.sdsu.edu/discoveries/history.html