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."
Franz Kafka’s porn brought out of the closet
(Thanks, Sherry!)
