Experts have unearthed a stash of explicit pornographic material belonging to German 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,” Times Online quoted Hawes, as saying.
“Academics have pretended it did not exist. The Kafka industry doesn’t want to know such things about its idol.
“Of the world’s authors, only Shakespeare generates more PhDs, more biographies, more coffee table books. Everything Kafka wrote, every postcard he ever sent, every page of his diary is regarded as a potential Ark of the Covenant. Yet no one has ever shown his readers Kafka’s porn,” he added.
Some of the author’s erotic material would be published in Excavating Kafka this month.