One Year in the Life of Franz Kafka — Dora Diamant

I was taken up by this about what Dora Diamant had said when she was to be interviewed in 1948 about Franz Kafka, who died in 1924 from tuberculosis in the hands of Dora Diamant.

It all depends on how you look at the subjective experience. But on Dora's terms, it makes sense — she was about to tell a story about the year she spent with Franz Kafka before he died.

In 1923 Dora volunteered to work for a Jewish charity which ran a holiday home for refugee children at Graal-Müritz in Mecklenburg on the Baltic coast. One of the other volunteers invited the almost unknown writer Franz Kafka, who was staying at the resort with his sister and her two children, to a Sabbath dinner at the camp. Dora had already glimpsed Kafka two days earlier, though at the time she was not aware of who he was. She had seen a family on the beach, the handsome father, as she assumed he was, sitting with his wife on covered beach chairs, indulgently watching the two children playing in the sand. On the night Kafka came to dinner Dora was in the kitchen cleaning and gutting fish, stripping off their scales and removing their heads as well as their bloody entrails. She recognised immediately the man from the beach when he stopped to talk to her; “such tender hands and such bloody work they do,” were Kafka’s idea of small talk. Dora soon learnt that the moody…