The Nightmare of Reason: A Life of Franz Kafka by Ernst Pawel

Author:Ernst Pawel [Pawel, Ernst]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Biographies & Memoirs, Arts & Literature, Authors, Professionals & Academics, Philosophers
Amazon: B005E8AIQO
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2011-04-01T11:00:00+00:00

Brod had only two weeks’ vacation and went straight home from Paris. Kafka had an additional week, which he spent at a Naturheilsanatorium —a naturopathic sanatorium—at Erlenbach, near Zurich, a place chiefly patronized by “aging middle-class Swiss matrons” suffering from constipation and obesity, where each day was rigidly scheduled with “baths, massages, gymnastics, obligatory rest periods before and after,” while the evenings were devoted to organized “social activities,” notably gramophone concerts featuring military bands and the reading of homespun poetry in the native Swiss dialect. For all his sarcasm in describing this ludicrous ambience, Kafka obviously derived considerable satisfaction from being fussed over and taken care of, getting precisely the kind of attention to which at home even illness never quite seemed to entitle him, because the father had always preempted such claims.

Still did, in fact: on the very eve of Kafka’s departure for Italy— the timing hardly accidental—Herrmann had once again gone through his standard repertoire. “Tomorrow I’m supposed to be leaving for Italy. And tonight Father was too upset to fall asleep, completely destroyed by business worries and by the illness which they had exacerbated. A wet cloth on the heart, nausea, shortness of breath, heavy sighs as he keeps pacing back and forth. The frightened mother tries to comfort him” (DI, 8/25/11).

In the absence of a mother, a Swiss sanatorium will do. At least it did, so he reports, alleviate his constipation, a perennial concern which Schnitzer’s instant diagnosis of “toxic accretions threatening the brain” may well have rendered more acute than ever. A week after his return he recorded, with markedly pregenital delight, that “the painter Kubin [Alfred Kubin, 1877-1959] recommends Regulin as a laxative, a pulverized seaweed that swells up in the gut and makes it quiver, thus acting mechanically, in contrast to the unhealthy chemical effect of other laxatives, which tear through the feces and leave them sticking to the bowel walls” (DI, 9/26/11). However morbid, there is something pathetically human about this conspicuous concern, an undigested sliver of infancy that for brief moments made all the world’s terrors amenable to natural catharsis by pulverized algae.

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