It is a tantalising mystery that has fascinated historians and fans alike for decades, but a biographer who gained access to one of the author’s closest friends’ diaries has revealed a new theory about Franz Kafka’s sexuality.

Kafka’s intense attraction to women but clear aversion to physical contact and sex has been a subject for discussion for years. Theories on his possible asexuality or repressed homosexuality contributed to the mythology around the author. Max Brod, writer and eventual inheritor of Kafka’s estate, once described his close friend as being “tortured by his sexual desires”. Kafka himself described his fear of intimacy in a letter to Brod in January 1921:

“Like a person who cannot resist the temptation to swim out into the sea, and is blissful to be carried away – ‘now you are a man, you are a great swimmer’ – and suddenly, with little reason, he raises himself up and sees only the sky and the sea, and on the waves is only his own little head and he is seized by a horrible fear and nothing else matters, he must get back to the shore, even if his lungs burst. That is how it is.”

But Reiner Stach, a Kafka academic and author of a three-volume biography, has developed a new theory on Kafka’s seemingly contradictory views on sex: that the author, like most people of the time, had an intense phobia of STDs and pregnancy.

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While researching for his third volume, titled Kafka: The Early Years (published in October in an English translation by Shelley Frisch), Stach obtained copies of Brod’s diaries between 1909 and 1911, when Kafka was in his mid-20s. In these hitherto unpublished diaries, Stach discovered a new side to the man often credited as being more rambunctious and sexually active than his friend Kafka: Brod himself was constantly and deeply worried about the consequences of sex.

“It was really astonishing. Max Brod was a real womaniser. He’d often talk about his ideal woman, the idea of women being the saviour of men – but when you read his diaries, there is nothing but fear: fear of unwanted pregnancies, syphilis, venereal diseases, on every page. It almost overwhelmed all his other interests,” Stach says.

“It is an outdated idea that Kafka was neurotic and Brod was healthy. I think Brod was just able to repress all of this in the couple of hours he spent with his lovers, and Kafka was not able to because his mind never slept.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘When you read his diaries, there is nothing but fear’ … Max Brod, photographed circa 1940. Photograph: Imagno/Getty Images

But, Stach says, this was “absolutely normal” for the bourgeois in early 20th-century Bohemia, where people were more interested in maintaining sexual hygiene than chasing sexual pleasure.

“I read a lot of books on sexuality published in the 1900s, books usually intended for young girls and men. They are just focused on risks, never about sexuality as a source of happiness. It is not about morality or religion - just medical risks,” Stach says. “But look at the historical and psychological context – men and women were really separated at the time … they were educated in completely different ways. So when they met for the first time, often in their early 20s, this was often very embarrassing and very frightening.”

Stach, who also read newspaper reports and memoirs of Kafka’s classmates and contemporaries to build a new portrait of the author, writes in the latest volume of the biography that Kafka was “unable to integrate his own sexuality into his self-image because he regarded it as something both physically and ethically impure, and therefore incapable of developing human intimacy with women who actively drew him into this filth – this anti-sensual and misogynist syndrome was shared by millions of middle-class men, whose upbringing simply did not allow for erotic happiness.”

Stach is not sure why the terms asexual and homosexual have so frequently been applied to an author who had such well-documented affairs with women. “I don’t know why it persists. Kafka had homosexual fantasies, but everyone does. He had a really intense access to his own subconscious, more than we might have, and this is why he is such a great writer. So, he had homosexual, bisexual, sadistic, masochistic and voyeuristic fantasies and all of these appeared in his works, which is typical for writers like Kafka. But you can’t conclude that he was any one of those things himself.”

The research brings new life to Kafka’s The Castle, Stach says. On Kafka’s manuscript for the novel, published posthumously in 1926, it is visible that Kafka originally wrote in the first person until he reached the first sex scene – at which point he changed it to be in the third person.

“He is always describing sex as a kind of self-alienation, as if you could lose yourself in sexual encounters,” Stach says. “He found it impossible to describe it from his point of view, as a subjective experience. So he distanced himself.”

While many have come before with theories to explain Kafka’s seemingly contradictory views on sex and women, none have identified Kafka as simply being a product of the sexual education system absorbed by most of his peers. This, Stach says, is partly due to the mythology around Kafka: other biographers, and parties such as the Brod estate, have been more preoccupied with finding new manuscripts and letters than examining what was already known.



“They’re always looking for new material, but they forget the masses of material we already have – and we can do so much with it if you put the puzzle pieces together,” he says.

Any further research may be stymied by ongoing legal wranglings with the Brod estate. Brod, who was entrusted with thousands of pages of Kafka’s writings on the promise he would burn them after Kafka’s death in 1924, in turn left the papers to his lover Esther Hoffe when he died in 1968. Hoffe’s elderly daughters have since kept all of the documents – estimated to be around 20,000 – in a small flat in Tel Aviv, stacking them in piles among their belonging and numerous cats. The situation has long been a source of frustration and amusement; the Israeli writer Etgar Keret once said: “The next best thing to having your stuff burned, if you’re ambivalent, is giving it to some guy who gives it to some lady who gives it to her daughters who keep it in an apartment full of cats, right?”

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In August, a legal battle between the Hoffe family and the National Library of Israel was resolved, with Israel winning the right to claim the papers because Brod had ambiguously promised to donate them. However, Israel has not yet attempted to remove and sort through the papers. Stach believes this will begin in early 2017.

In addition to the Hoffes’ archive, Stach says around 17 letters from Kafka to his last lover, Dora Diamant, and around 20 of the author’s notebooks are believed to have been lost after Diamant’s flat was raided by the Gestapo in 1933. “Perhaps someone will find them in an archive someday, in Berlin, Krakow or Moscow. There are still tons of papers, so there is still some hope.”