Kafka's Porn Stash

[David Morris]

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/article4446131.ece

Excavating Kafka, a new book by James Hawes, includes (for the first
time) material gleaned from Kafka's hardcore porn stash, booklets that
were published by the same publisher who published Kafka's own work.

Even today, the pornography would be "on the top shelf", Dr Hawes
said, noting that his American publisher did not want him to publish
it at first. "These are not naughty postcards from the beach. They are
undoubtedly porn, pure and simple. Some of it is quite dark, with
animals committing fellatio and girl-on-girl action... It's quite
unpleasant."

"Academics have pretended it did not exist," Dr Hawes said. "The Kafka
industry doesn't want to know such things about its idol."

He added: "Perhaps Kafka's biographers simply don't like the idea that
their literary idol was helped out in this... way in the vital early
stages of his career... Of the world's authors, only Shakespeare
generates more PhDs, more biographies, more coffee-table books...
Everything Kafka wrote, every postcard he ever sent, every page of his
diary... is regarded as a potential Ark of the Covenant... Yet no-one
has ever shown his readers Kafka's porn."