#Kafka writer full#

In spring 1933 the Gestapo raided a Berlin apartment where she was living with the man she subsequently married, Ludwig Lask, a German Communist leader, they carted off a number of Kafka manuscripts, including, possibly, the doll letters. However, she did not destroy as many manuscripts as she initially claimed… We know that Dora Diamant burned quite a few manuscripts on Kafka’s instructions, and it is possible that the doll letters also went up in flames.

Kafka may not have given them to the little girl to keep or he may have held on to copies. As for the letters themselves, there is a remote possibility that they could still surface. The little girl may have died many years ago, or been traumatized by later events, or perhaps even been Jewish and been killed during the Holocaust. So what happened to the little girl and the doll letters? As is often the case with Kafka, there are multiple possibilities. The details about the incident and the doll story itself sound authentic, and, though Dora had an exalted, mystical streak … she had too high an opinion of Kafka to engage in any such fabrication. However, it seems unlikely that she would just have invented this encounter in the park. Why, despite several searches, of which mine was only the latest, have no witnesses to the doll story ever materialized? One obvious hypothesis is that Dora Diamant simply made up the incident.

He recounted his quest in a 2004 essay in the New England Review, outlining several possible explanations for the story and the absence of corroborating evidence so far:Īs I had half-anticipated all along, nothing much came to the surface. In 2001, while living and working in Berlin, Harman himself searched for evidence to substantiate the doll story, but nothing concrete emerged. That version, according to Harman, included an ending in which Kafka, in order to further comfort the little girl, did indeed provide her with a replacement. However, according to the Irish-American Kafka scholar and translator Mark Harman, Diamant told a slightly different version to Max Brod, the novelist’s lifelong friend and the executor of his estate. Rather, after writing a letter every day “for at least three weeks,” Kafka eventually ended the episode by informing the little girl (in the persona of the doll), that she was to be married and begin a new life with her husband: “You yourself will understand, we must give up seeing each other.”

In this version, there is no replacement doll, no reunion with the little girl, and no heartwarming discovery of a note a year later.

#Kafka writer full#

The Robert/Rudolf version of the story can be read in full below and here. Rudolf prefaces the tale by describing it as a “simple, perfect and true Kafka story,” which Diamant had originally relayed in person to Marthe Robert, a French Kafka translator, in the early 1950s. In 1982, Ronald Hayman mentioned the doll story in his biography of Kafka, and in 1984, the literary critic Anthony Rudolf published a version of the story, translated from French, in the literary supplement of the Jewish Chronicle. Paul Auster included the doll story in his 2005 novel “ The Brooklyn Follies,” and it inspired the March 2021 graphic novel “ Kafka and the Doll” by Larissa Theule and Rebecca Green. That piece appears to have been the original written source of the wording of the final, touching message from Kafka: “Everything you love will probably be lost, but in the end, love will return in another way.” One especially influential iteration of it came in October 2011, when the psychoanalyst and writer May Benatar recalled the story in a column for HuffPost. The vignette has enjoyed waves of popularity on social media in recent years and saw a resurgence in February and March 2021, prompting inquiries from Snopes readers. A year earlier, he met the 25-year-old Dora Diamant, from Poland, and the couple lived together in Berlin until March 1924 - the period during which the “doll” episode is purported to have taken place.

He died in Austria in June 1924 at age 40. Kafka, the renowned author of significant novels including “The Metamorphosis” and “The Trial,” was born in Prague, in what is now the Czech Republic, in July 1883. However, despite the enthusiastic efforts of several Kafka experts and researchers, concrete proof - for example copies of the “doll” letters themselves - has never been found.Īs such, it remains “Unproven,” but some experts have written that its core claims are plausible. The story, in several versions, has a venerable history dating back more than half a century and was first recounted by a source very close to Kafka himself - his partner for the final year of his life, Dora Diamant.