great-writers

Franz Kafka: Pornographer

ian spiegelman · 08/03/08 05:05PM

Franz Kafka wrote dark, brilliant, surreal works of souls in crisis, bureaucracy run amuck, dehumanizing class systems-and a lot of dirty, sexy smut. Researches have discovered a bounty of porn in the great writer's notebooks, and they mean for you to read it. "Experts have unearthed a stash of explicit pornographic material belonging to German [he was Czech, actually] author Franz Kafka. The erotic material has been ignored by scholars anxious to preserve the writer's image. James Hawes, an academic and Kafka expert came across the material in copies of Kafka's journals in the British Library in London and the Bodleian in Oxford. Hawes said that the author's stash shows him as more human than a popular quasi-saintly writer. 'These are not naughty postcards from the beach. They are undoubtedly porn, pure and simple. Some of it is quite dark. It's quite unpleasant.'"