visuality

In the years leading up to the recent centennial of Franz Kafka’s death, perhaps the most significant revelation to emerge about the paragon of twentieth-century literature is that he had a strong interest in drawing. Over one hundred pages of drawings by Kafka, most of them previously unknown, were made public in 2021 by the National Library of Israel in an online repository, and they have opened the door to new consideration of the place of visual production in Kafka’s life and work. An extensive illustrated catalog with reproductions of all of Kafka’s known renderings, Franz Kafka: The Drawings, was published later that same year by Andreas Kilcher, and both the images and the book have inspired extensive commentary and reflection.