Franz Kafka's Diaries, written in

German language German ( ) is a West Germanic language mainly spoken in Central Europe. It is the most widely spoken and official or co-official language in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Liechtenstein, and the Italian province of South Tyrol. It is als ...

between 1910-1923, include casual observations, details of daily life, reflections on philosophical ideas, accounts of dreams, and ideas for stories. Kafka’s diaries offer a detailed view of the writer's thoughts and feelings, as well as some of his most famous and quotable statements. Kafka began keeping the diaries at the age of 27, as an attempt to provoke his stalled creativity, and kept writing in them until 1923, a year before his death. These diaries were in the background all through the composition of Kafka's major works and many of them are discussed and analyzed in detail. The diaries offer an image of a profoundly depressed man, isolated from friends and family, involved in a series of failed relationships, and constantly sick. While this is certainly part of Kafka's character, it is typical for a private journal, not meant for publication, to express more of the writer's anxieties and worries. The humor and light-heartedness sometimes expressed in Kafka's fiction, as well as the generally positive image arising from recollections by friends and acquaintances, are missing from the diaries. Initially published by

Schocken Books Schocken Books is a book publishing imprint of Penguin Random House that specializes in Jewish literary works. Originally established in 1931 by Salman Schocken as Schocken Verlag in Berlin, the company later moved to Palestine and then the U ...

in two volumes, ''The Diaries of Franz Kafka 1910-1913'' and ''The Diaries of Franz Kafka 1914-1923'', they were brought together in a single volume in 1964.

References

*Kafka, Franz. ''Diaries 1910-1923''.

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, 1988.

External links

Translated excerpts from 1910 - 1923

The Kafka Project">Kafka project, The Kafka Project
, started in 1998 with the purpose of publishing online all Kafka texts in German {{Kafka Books by Franz Kafka category:Books published posthumously Diaries 1988 non-fiction books Schocken Books books de:Franz Kafka