This is the kind of thing that happens to me in the course of my research...

Hartmut Binder

Since I devoted myself to researching Kafka’s life and world, the idea that Franz, being unable to bear the entire curse of his existence on his own weak shoulders, had delegated part of it to posterity, has kept creeping up on me – after all, he seems, impishly, to evade every more detailed enquiry.

Kafka refers in a letter to a passage of an operetta that he found enchanting, and so you want to look at the libretto, which is now hard to find? Well, you may eventually succeed in tracking down the text, but you can be certain that the copy you get hold of will be missing the vital page. An even worse fate would await anyone who wanted to dig up the Jewish folk play that Kafka describes in such detail in his diaries because he finds it more fascinating than any other drama. It is simply nowhere to be found. With the benefit of hindsight, I wonder to this day how, given all this, I ever had the nerve to hunt for the Russian dancer who appeared with the Imperial Russian Ballet in Prague in the spring of 1910 and so enraptured Kafka, as he later wrote in a letter to his fiancée, that he dreamt of her for months. You guessed it – such a guest performance never even took place, and there is no concrete evidence of this Eduardova in the Russian archives.

After a series of such fiascos, it would seem advisable to confine enquiries more closely to widely-known historic monuments and easily accessible locations, which, you’d think, would find it harder to abscond. Far from it! The mere fact that Kafka’s two Prague flats, in which he wrote all his works, were destroyed in the course of the war, despite the city as a whole coming away from German occupation virtually unscathed, should offer pause for thought. Once, sadly unperturbed by this, I attempted to identify a gargoyle on Milan Cathedral that had attracted Kafka’s particular attention. Can it really be regarded as a coincidence that there are 366 of them there, whose animal faces and demon jaws positively leer down on you, but none in the human form that Kafka had described? If there were any room left for doubt, let it be quashed by the unexpected summer storm that caught me by surprise on the Duomo roof, already discouraged by my vain quest and worn down by a heroic struggle against nascent acrophobia, and soaked me to the skin. Defeated, I headed for the lift, but just as I was about to enter it, I came face to face with what I’d been looking for. The only snag? I’d used up my film and, despite the hustle and bustle in the square below, it was a public holiday and I was unable to buy a replacement anywhere.

So, it seems only natural that when I tried to visit the village of St Marghuerita on Lake Lugano, which Kafka visited on a cruise from Lugano in 1911, I should fail to arrive, in an experience apparently tailor-made for one of his own heroes. The venture proved utterly impossible, because the picturesque spot amid the steep cliffs on the southern shore can only be reached by ship or by chair lift and, that summer, neither was in operation. The obvious solution of attending to the matter by letter was also a total disaster. I received either no answer at all, or a response from Santa Marghuerita Ligure on the Italian Riviera.

All in all, the associated dangers mean I can only expressly warn others against such research! When I hired a boat in an attempt to photograph a mysterious villa that had struck Kafka on the aforementioned pleasure cruise, I slipped on the muddy bank and fell into the water. Worse still, an Australian colleague wanted to travel to Prague with Hebrew xerocopies in his case, to continue studying his sources in situ. Those papers were suspicious enough that he was flatly denied entry!

Yet despite such adverse circumstances, I have achieved results that can now be published in quite a chunky book. You may well ask “how?” Well, I would say: you attempt the wild goose chase, trust in chance and generally adhere to the insights offered by Kafka’s works. Many years ago, on a visit to Prague, I wanted to see Kafka’s then-unpublished letters to his favourite sister Ottla; however, the owner, who lived in the Bohemian Forest, was not prepared to show them to me. I had already met her in person in Prague and been turned down, and then, late in the evening, I received a telephone message confirming how unwelcome my presence in that little backwater on the edge of a restricted military area would be for many reasons, including political ones.

But I found myself thinking of the man from the country in Before the Law, who is forbidden to gain entry to the law, despite the gateway being intended only for him. I was now able to verify, in the right historic setting and in empirical reality, my conviction that the man from the country would have been ushered, so to speak, without any difficulty into a grand boulevard if he had only dared to step through the gate despite the ban. I promptly sought out the border village, where I received a very warm welcome. Standing on a table in the middle of a large farmhouse parlour was the box I had been longing to see, which soon gave up in secrets; meanwhile, next door in the kitchen, they were hard at work preparing a lavish meal for me, so that I would have the strength I needed for this valiant work.

Admittedly, if you want to identify people known only because their names crop in Kafka’s letters and diaries, then other rules apply. Why should there be the least difficulty in finding a “Frau Thein”, mentioned in a letter, or in gaining information on the subsequent whereabouts of former Prague-Germans known to Kafka, especially when they were ordinary mortals, non-literati who of course left no documentary trace in the libraries? In these instances, you can console yourself with the Country Doctor, as the author of his story did: Isn’t it possible that horses and groom alike will come crawling out of a tumble-down pigsty, and enable the doctor to continue his journey? And isn’t it entirely conceivable, as Kafka once wrote in his diary, that “the glory of life lies ready for each of us, and always in all its fullness” but “deep down, invisible”? Thus, I wrote to Nelly Engel in London, the sister of Friedrich Thieberger, Kafka’s Hebrew teacher; I had been corresponding with her for years and “of course” she knew the address of Frau Thein, who was living in New York. When she received my letter, the 80-year-old was just in the middle of narrating her memories of Kafka to her daughter, and was happy to pass them to me in a long letter. And in the end, I was even able to clear up the mystery of the Russian ballet dancer in a similar way.