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Throughout her entire career, Nurse Anna saw many people die, but the memory of one death in particular never left her, it remained indelible in her memory: the death of Franz Kafka. It happened on June 3, 1924.
Many years later, now retired, Anna told journalist Willy Haas what she witnessed in the final moments of the extraordinary Czech author. She told him that Kafka and his doctor, Robert Klopstock, had reached a secret agreement: that when she approached “the last hour” she would make her companion, Dora Diamant, leave the room so that she would not see her agony.
After years of suffering from tuberculosis, the end was near. Dora was asked to go to the post office to send a letter. She administered morphine to the patient, who, suddenly, started calling Dora. The nurse sent for her immediately, although she feared it was too late. Dora, out of breath, ran in, straight to the bed. Everyone in the room, the doctors, Anna herself, thought she had already died, except Dora, who whispered to him to smell the flowers she had brought. Kafka smelled them. “It was incredible,” the nurse recalled. Shortly after, she died.
He tells that story to BBC World, Kathi Diamant, author of “Dora Diamant – The Last Love of Frank Kafka”. Haas found the text in 1998, when she was reviewing the archives of the German newspaper Der Tagesspiegel.
“I was surprised that this material existed. “That article was published, in 1953, by this respected writer, who knew Kafka, who wrote about him, who knew the Prague Circle, who may even have been part of it,” he added. But, the researcher said, the stories about Kafka’s death did not include that information: “This last scene with Dora was omitted and should not have been that way”.
However, Dora’s presence in Kafka’s final hours was not unknown. Kathi first heard her name in 1971, when her German literature professor at the University of Georgia (USA) interrupted their translation of Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis” to ask her: “Are you related?” of Dora Diamant?” “Probably, who is she?” the then 19-year-old student responded. “She was Kafka’s last lover, they were very in love, he died in her arms. She burned her work”, answered the teacher.
Kathi embarked on a mission that took decades and many trips to Europe, the Middle East: discover Dora Diamant. “After Kafka’s death, it was not known what happened to her, he disappeared from the public record,” he lamented.
The researcher found that she had been born into a Hasidic Jewish family in Poland in 1898. After refusing to marry a man her father had chosen, she left home and emigrated to Germany, where she studied at the Jewish Academy in Berlin. “Her intention was to move to Palestine,” she considered.
Among the many activities in which she collaborated with the Jewish community in Berlin, she volunteered at a camp for Eastern European children that was organized in the summer of 1923, in Graal-Müritz. “They were refugees from the First World War who lived in Berlin.” There, facing the Baltic Sea, Dora saw a man who caught her attention.
“Kafka was with his sister and her children on vacation. “They stayed in a hotel near the camp,” Kathi said, adding: “Dora saw him for the first time on the beach, playing with a boy who she assumed was her son.”
When he noticed a woman (his sister) joining them, it reinforced the idea that he was married. One day later, when he was cleaning a fish in the kitchen, he saw a shadow. When he turned around, he discovered that he was the man on the beach. He looked at her, he smiled at her and her first words to her were: ‘Such delicate hands and you have to do such bloody work‘. Thus, in the midst of dead fish, one of the great love stories began,” she said.
Kafka was 40 years old and she was 25. Another of the camp workers had invited him to come in and, later, to have dinner. With her singleness clarified, Kathi points out that that night, Dora highlighted the goodness she found in Kafka, who He was delighted to hear her read in Hebrew.. “They were together every day for three weeks until he left Graal-Müritz. But they had already decided that they would meet in Berlin.”
Despite adverse circumstances – Kafka’s health was worsening due to tuberculosis and inflation was skyrocketing in Berlin – the couple began to live together.
For more than a decade, Reiner Stach dedicated himself to researching and writing the three installments of his acclaimed biography of Kafka.
He says that most of what is known about Dora is thanks to Kathi’s work., Although researching for his books he had access to original documents that reflect his life with Kafka in Berlin and in the Kierling sanatorium, in Austria, where the writer died. “These documents convey a very vivid image of the extremely difficult situation Dora found herself in,” she tells BBC World.
And he noted: “The hope that their loved one would survive tuberculosis decreased week by week. But she didn’t allow herself to take away his last illusion. At the same time, she had to deal with Kafka’s parents, especially over financial issues, without even knowing them. And Kafka’s sisters expected truthful reports from Dora about her state of health. “It was pressure from all sides.”
“It is a testimony of incredible strength, of how much humanity and practicality Dora showed in that situation. I only gradually realized that,” she added.
According to Kathi, Kafka fell in love easily and frequently: “He saw the best in women, he loved them.” He had several relationships, but they did not prosper. “Until Dora arrived”, he commented.
And, as he pointed out to BBC World Michael Kumpfmuller, “She didn’t demand anything from him except her mere existence and he felt free with her.”. “Kafka was shy and open-minded at the same time. I think he felt they were alike, lost and strong, willing to take the risks of love.”
Kumpfmüller is the author of “The Greatness of Life,” a fictional account of Kafka and Dora’s relationship that served as the basis for the film of the same title. For Kathi, “Dora was responsible for making the last year of Kafka’s life the happiest of the writer.” She offered him the opportunity to do what he always dreamed of: “move to Berlin and live the free life of a writer.”
And with that, he also showed him that he could live “free from his father’s expectations and control.” And Kafka’s difficult relationship with his father has been pointed out many times as the source of his insecurities. In many ways, she was an inspiration to Kafka, “she was a unique, independent woman, who was quite clear about what she wanted in life.”
“Kafka had long been fascinated with Eastern European Judaism and Dora was like an heir to that. She embodied something that he deeply respected, not just in terms of her culture, but because of the way she approached religion.” He learned a lot from Dora, from the stories she told him.from the Hasidic narrative traditions that he knew.
“They coincided on different levels, intellectually and emotionally. He received the strength and support that he needed.” “Max Brod, Kafka’s best friend, said that Dora had perfected him, that finally, in this last stage of his life, she had found his life partner.”
“While the people around her were pragmatic, she played with him and allowed themselves to dream of opening a restaurant in Tel Aviv, in which she would be the cook and he would be the innkeeper,” Kathi said.
Dora represented the possibility for Kafka to materialize what he longed for: start your own family.
But the lawyer, who wrote in his free time, “did not see writing as compatible with marriage.” Although it is impossible to know precisely what their coexistence was like, for Stach it is clear that they achieved something that Kafka never imagined: “happy intimacy with a woman, without the predominance of sexuality or the conventional demands of marriage.”
“Dora even says that he worked on his literary texts in her presence. That must have been almost a revolution for Kafka, because ten years earlier he believed that the highest literary quality could only be achieved in absolute solitude. I think that if Kafka had recovered, Living with Dora would have resolved his agonizing lifelong conflict between marriage and literature.. “It would have been a release for him.” It was a conflict that went further, as Kumpfmüller remembers.
“Kafka always thought that life and art were antagonistic; that you couldn’t have both. With Dora he knew that he was totally wrong in that assumption, that life and art are compatible.”
Kafka represented for Dora what a human being should be. “To her, he was an extraordinary being, committed to her fellow human beings on an existential level,” Kathi says. And that was what made her fall in love, his talent as a writer had nothing to do with it.
“She began reading his books after his death.. So it must have been the impression he made on her, the way she looked, how he looked at her, how he talked to her, how he ‘investigated’ her,” Kumpfmüller noted. Furthermore, “Kafka was always in a good mood,” Dora wrote.
Kathi recalls some words that Dora wrote to Brod in 1930, after the publication of three unfinished novels by Kafka: “While I lived with Fanz, all I could see was: him and me. Anything other than himself was irrelevant.” He confessed to the philosopher Felix Weltsch that “living with Franz for a single day was worth more than all of his work.”
At Kafka’s insistence, Dora had to burn part of her manuscripts. Kathi tells that she did it in front of him. However, she secretly saved dozens of letters that he wrote to her and 20 notebooks.
When Kafka died, Brod asked her if she had kept anything, but she told him she had burned everything. She lied to honor the writer’s wish that he did not want said writings to be public.
He kept up the lie for years, until Nazism came to power and the Gestapo raided his apartment and took many of his papers. In 1998, Kathi founded the Kafka Project at the University of San Diego (USA) with the mission of recovering lost texts.
After Kafka’s death, Dora turned to professional acting, joined the German Communist Party and married Lutz Lask, with whom she had her daughter, Franziska Marianne. The Nazis arrested Lask, but he managed to escape to the Soviet Union, where he was joined by Dora and the girl. After being accused of being a “Trotskyist saboteur,” he was convicted and sent to Siberia. Dora and her daughter managed to flee and reach England in 1939.
“She was very brave, a woman who, between two world wars, made her way in the world”said Kathi, who found no relation to Dora. She died at age 54 in 1952. The headstone on her grave, in a London cemetery, has the words of Robert Klopstock, Kafka’s doctor: “Only those who know Dora know what love is”.
BBC World
