The Mystical Life of Franz Kafka

 

            In The Mystical Life of Franz Kafka, author and Kafka scholar June O. Leavitt explores the world in which Kafka lived.  This book deals with such ideas as the occult, souls leaving bodies, Jewish Cabala, vegetarianism, and much more.  Writing during the early twentieth century in Austria, these interests provide a small window into what life was actually like for a young Jewish man at the time, although Kafka’s life could be considered anything but normal.  Leavitt composes her book in a manner that follows Kafka’s journey through life, highlighting some of his more peculiar interests, and then explores the relationship between these interests and the worlds Kafka created on the page.  Leavitt uses both information from other Kafka scholars and directly from Kafka’s writing.  Kafka’s words are first presented fully in German and then fully in English – an interesting approach given that the rest of the book is in English.  This is probably done to provide an accurate translation of the original German and to help eliminate the small differences translated texts have.

The book is written like a long essay in that it includes an introduction and a conclusion, but it also includes seven more chapters of information.  Each of the seven chapters is broken up into three to five separate sub-sections.  Leavitt uses these sub-sections to narrow the focus of her book and look more in depth into the large concept of each chapter.  An example of this would be chapter seven, entitled “The Mystical Life of Animals: Investigations of a Vegetarian.”  The sub-sections of the chapter are entitled “Vegetarianism and Animal Sacrifice: A Case of Mistaken Tradition,” “The Mystical experience of a Dog,” “The Dog’s Christological Interpretation of the Mystical Report,” and “The Christianized Occult Context.”  As one can see, each of the sub-headings relates directly to the chapter, but focus more in depth on a topic that Leavitt decided was most relevant to Kafka’s life and writings. The one hundred eighty-page biography contains thirteen pages of endnotes, a ten-page bibliography and a seven-page index.  Given the relatively short length of the book, this is a wealth of resources that the reader can consult for both quick reference and further studies on Kafka.

The Kafka Project

            Between 1923 and 1924, Franz Kafka wrote thirty-five letters and twenty notebooks of sketches, ideas, and writings that became lost when the Third Reich confiscated them in 1933.  These papers are known as Kafka’s lost papers.  He wrote the letters to Dora Diamant, his last love, in the final year of his life.  Diamant kept the letters and journals until they were confiscated.  The Kafka Project’s goal is to regain all of those lost papers.  In order to complete this seemingly impossible task, they have gotten permission to conduct an official search for Kafka’s papers.  The group expanded their search in 1998 to include the work of Dora Diamant.  In this manner, they have been able to locate some of Kafka’s papers and personal effects as well as Diamant’s work.  Through this new material, Kafka’s Last Love: The Mysterious Dora Diamant by Kathi Diamant was written.

The Kafka Project has an official website, www.kafkaproject.com where all of the group’s work can be found.  When the Kafka Project finds work of either Kafka’s or Diamant’s, they post it on the website, sometimes including a scan of the document so that interested readers can see Diamant’s and Kafka’s handwritten letters and writings.  This serves a very functional role in addition to being a way to keep people interested because one has to know what their handwriting looks like in order to identify their work.  The website does not look like it has been updated very much since 2011.  The only pages that have recent or future dates on them are the home page and the Magical Mystery Tours page.

Navigating the website is fairly straightforward.  To the left of the screen, there are tabs to jump to the different portions of the website; they include the home page, a tour page, mission, advisory committee, discoveries, news and a contact page.  The group is run under the umbrella of San Diego State University Research Foundation and has an advisory board that ranges from American professors and authors to translators from Europe and Kafka scholars.  This source is great for anyone interested in Kafka’s missing work or just the enigma that is Franz Kafka.